Regarding the ship of Tamil migrants, which the government no doubt is trying to use to change the channel from the census debacle (Look! Queue-jumpers, terrorists and human smugglers! We’ve even got Ezra Levant on the case!), Michael Ignatieff is already saying that they’ve mishandled the situation, seeing as they had three months to come up with a solution while the boat crossed the ocean. (There’s a little more on the Tamil situation in Sri Lanka here.)
On the census front, Tony Clement says the bare-minimum changes regarding language questions are as far as he’s going to go “because there’s still coercion involved.” *sigh*
Still looking to change the channel from the census debacle, Vic Toews writes an editorial in the National Post to explain why they’re “tough on crime,” including closing prison farms, that’s full of half-truths and misleading statistics. Speaking of prison farms, the official media arm of The Party has officially taken “populist news” to the point of parody with an editorial advocating the return of chain gangs as a replacement for prison farms. Seriously? Don’t any of you get the rehabilitative value of the prison farms? Oh, wait – that’s not the point. Right…. How silly of me to have forgotten.
Harper was apparently flooded with emails regarding the whole auditor general performance audit. It seems the people who believed he was riding in on a white horse of accountability and transparency got a whiff of his party’s hypocrisy and didn’t like it one bit.
Not that one should take anything the man says seriously, but Angelo Persichilli says that one development out of the Conservatives’ summer caucus meeting was the creation of “focus groups” of MPs and senators, assigned to cabinet ministers, in order to get the best ideas from everyone. Of course, that presupposes that this isn’t a government of one, where the man at the centre is calling all the shots. It also smacks of make-work projects for the backbenchers to keep them busy, given that idle hands are the devil’s playthings, and all of that.
Conservative MP (and chief apple polisher) Candice Hoeppner is taking her campaign to scrap the long-gun registry to the web. Ooh. Is it a site that can be accessed by dial-up, so that it can actually be accessed by the rural ridings she’s targeting?
And finally, Scott Feschuk at Maclean’s reminds us about Jane Taber’s many sins against the practice of journalism in a single Saturday column about the prime minister’s summer vacation.
Why you can trust Xtra
