Stephen Harper and his team of Conservatives continue to demonstrate their disrespect for Parliament and democracy in the latest news story exposing deception.
It seems that some of the funding for the G8 summit was wasteful and absurd. Things like improvements to downtown areas 100 km away from the Summit (worth about three quarters of a million dollars) smack of opportunistic spending to bolster the ridings of Conservative representatives. While one might think that therein lies the problem, well, one would be wrong.
The problem is that, once again, the Conservatives have lied to Parliament about the whole affair. There is even some question that these actions were illegal, but, conveniently, the office responsible for the report refused to release the entire document until after the election. I’m not sure if that’s a good or abad thing for the Conservatives. One thing is for sure; it is a bad thing for the Canadian voters.
However, what was leaked seems fairly black and white, so let’s tally up the record that Harper’s Conservatives have racked up over the past few years.
1. Lying to Parliament about G8 expenditures to the extent that criminal transgression is being contemplated.
2. Being fouind in “contempt of Parliament” for two separate actions. The first was improper disclosure of the transaction involving military jets. The second was Bev Oda altering a document and then misrepresenting that alteration to Parliament. (don’t make the mistake of thinking that it was the Budget which led to the downfall of the government. The non-confidence motion was about the contempt finding.
3. Harper is lying daily to the Canadian people about the threat of the coalition, flogging it constantly even though it is a non issue and even though he used exactly the same sort of tactic when he was the opposition back in 2004 (-which he denies having done, even though there is a signed letter).
4. To avoid facing the heat of a potential scandal in Parliament, Harper took the unprecedented step of proroguing Parliament.
5. Harper’s Conservatives withheld information about the involvement of Canadian troops in the torture of Afghani detainees.
6. While Harper admits that he was aware of Bruce Carson’s two convictions for theft, he claims that he was unaware of his three convictions for fraud when he hired him as an adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office. Now, am I mistaken, or is it a little questionable that the PM’s office hire a known convict? But the idea that they were unaware of the other three convictions is just ridiculous. Who is expected to buy that??
To make sure that we have less objective information by which to detect lies, Harper government has proposed the elimination of a detailed census. That way we can’t see that there are four times as many Fundamentalist Christians sitting in Parliament, compared to the actual number in Canada’s population.
While all politicians lie, the dishonesty that we’ve seen over the past five years of the “Harper government” is unprecedented. It makes you wonder what tidbits remain undiscovered.
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