While U.S. President Barack Obama has been meeting with China, the world's largest greenhouse-gas emitter, trying to galvanize an international climate agreement, Canada, which uses more energy per capita than almost any other country, is like the hare that lies down for a nap while the tortoise overtakes it. Only Canada hasn't woken up from its nap, and the consequences of sleeping a little longer grow exponentially by the day.
It's not really fair to blame Canada. It's really the federal government that's asleep. The Canadian public has already woken up; 62 per cent of us say Ottawa should set "higher and harder targets" to reduce global warming pollution, according to Harris-Decima polling this October.
Seems something of this has gotten to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, who recently proposed a cap-and-trade system that would actually reduce global warming pollution.
After months of criticizing the government without revealing his own plan, Ignatieff proposed a system that he says would be fair for all provinces and would apply to all industries. No special treatment - not even for Canada's tar sands.
The Bloc Québécois and the New Democratic Party support this approach as do Canada's largest provinces. All recognize that our economy will be stronger if we stimulate clean energy. In fact the jobs of the future depend on staying in the race.
We believe this is the right approach for Canada. It recognizes that the way toward business certainty and environmental health is to stimulate innovation and reward environmental responsibility.
It's also true we must be compatible with a future U.S. energy system and climate plan. But we're not remotely keeping up with the Americans, who are outspending Canada as much as 14 to 1 per capita on government investment in a green economy. The Americans are doubling renewable energy production while Canada's incentives were not re-funded in the last federal budget.
Close to nothing has been done to ensure Canadians, not to mention our children and grandchildren, benefit from the new direction the world is taking. Canada keeps hitting "snooze" just as the world, and especially our major trading partner, is waking up to the reality and necessity of a clean energy economy.
Rather than being constructive globally, rather than using our diplomacy to find common pathways forward for the developed and developing nations, Canada says we must wait for others, even though others are further ahead.
Just like the hare, Canada is riding on a false sense of confidence that could end badly - a race lost as the planet approaches climate tipping points like the potential disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers (the source of fresh water for 2 billion people in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China).
Canada's tar sands alone hold the potential to push the world above two degrees of warming and into runaway climate change - an unprecedented responsibility.
In the race against global warming, Canada belongs at the front of the pack with our allies. Setting tough limits on global warming pollution and substantial investments in a green energy economy would get Canada back in the race.
(Steven Guilbeault is with Equiterre; Rick Smith with Environmental Defence; Tzeporah Berman with PowerUP Canada; and Dale Marshall with the David Suzuki Foundation.)
Murray Dobbin recently posted an excellent piece on his blog about Harper and his plans to sabotage action on climate change ... again. So apparently he is only going to Copenhagen for the photo-ops, and if that's the case, he should stay home. I don't need anymore dart board covers.
Stephen Harper is clearly not moved by Canada’s rapidly decaying reputation regarding its appalling position of climate change. In a Bloomberg story I have not seen reported anywhere in the Canadian media, Harper told the South Korean National Assembly that he will “…use Canada’s co-chairmanship of next year’s Group of 20 countries meeting to urge members to put economic recovery before efforts to protect the environment.”
This is a blatant violation of the role that Canada has been given to co-chair the first meeting of the G20 as a body acknowledged as the effective replacement of the G8. Canada is now not only a rogue country on climate change but is headed by a rogue prime minister – stating openly that he will abuse his power as a co-chair to do everything he can to derail climate change action and protect the deadly tar sands of Alberta from any effort to slow down its development.
Harper’s speech in South Korea’s happened the same day that a US report, published in the prestigious, peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claimed that Alberta’s monitoring of the tar sands was completely inadequate and vastly underestimated the pollution of the environment saying that “..estimated airborne emissions of PACs [polycyclic aromatic compounds] from the industry’s activities as amounting to a major oil spill each year if they were in a single place.”
Based on its own independent monitoring of rivers, the study’s authors openly contradict the Alberta government’s claims that the pollution in the Athabasca and other rivers is due to naturally occurring hydrocarbon compounds. The study states: “At sites in the oil sands area where nearby land has not been disturbed, PAC levels in rivers are similar to what is found in remote Canadian Arctic waterways, but in areas most affected by extraction activity, they rise by 10 to nearly 50-fold, reaching amounts within the range of harm to aquatic life.”
None of this will phase Harper or the Alberta government (which has already dismissed the report) given that they inhabit what one of George Bush’s advisors called the “faith-based world” as opposed to the “reality-based” world of the scientists they detest.
But perhaps we could persuade Harper to stay home from Copenhagen where he can only do more damage. If we invited him to something he would actually like to attend, maybe he would cancel his trip. Something like:
“You are formally invited to attend a Memorial Dinner honouring Milton Friedman to be held on December 14. The gathering will include your friends and allies from the National Citizens Coalition, the Fraser Institute, and the oil industry. We would like you to address the assembled guests on the remarks you made in 1997 (quoted in the Toronto Star, April 6 1997) that conservatives “work to dismantle the remaining elements of the interventionist state…” If you could link this to your views on obstructing government action on climate change, this would be of particular interest to our audience.”
Or:
‘We would like you to attend the formal opening of a private health care clinic on December 15. We would appreciate it if you could cut the ribbon opening this private, for-profit clinic and make a few remarks on how it fulfills the dream of the organization you once headed up – the National Citizens’ Coalition, that was founded by Colin M. Brown to turn back public Medicare.”
The hacked email story has taken on a life of it's own and you know when brilliant minds like James Inhofe and Glen Beck get involved, there has to be something to it, right?
Conspiracy theories abound and deniers are saying "I told you so". But who is right?
Global warming is definitely a threat. We've seen the hard evidence. But the debate now seems to be whether or not it is man made or a natural phenomenon. Many are demanding that no tax dollars go into fighting something that can't be fought. But what if they're wrong?
The video shown on this post presents the matter very well and is worth revisiting, but maybe I can put this another way.
I personally believe that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have nothing to do with fighting terrorism. As deniers are now suggesting that we look at who is benefiting from the money going into the 'climate change industry', it's not too difficult to determine who is benefiting from these wars. (Ironically many of the same people who benefit from denying the effects of carbon on the planet).
My theory is substantiated by former CIA agents and others, including the diplomat Matthew Hoh, who resigned after realizing that there was no rebuilding going on in Afghanistan, and that the whole thing was a farce. There also seems to be some very compelling evidence that Bin Laden has been dead for seven years, and that the Taliban are a very small group of dissidents, who have actually been empowered since the invasion.
And lets not forget the growing mountain of evidence that 9/11 was an inside job. Or that Al Quaeda is a fictional army, named after a computer from the 60's. I'll bet there are many emails floating around in cyberspace from the Pentagon and US state department that pose many questions about the 'proof'.
Now I might have a heated argument with someone, where I lay out my claims, at the end of which, I might be asked 'but what if you're wrong'? What if we did nothing and there was a terrorist attack on the US or Canada that made 9/11 seem like a dry run?
Now let's look at this from an another angle. What is the worst that could happen if we move away from fossil fuels toward a green economy? We can't deny that exhaust from vehicles is affecting the environment. Childhood asthma is on the rise.So are birth defects.
The late Dennis Weaver once stated that there would not be peace in the Middle East until the western world gave up their addiction to oil. So this could also be a first move toward world peace.
I'm not seeing a down side.
I am not a scientist and frankly when I hear the debates about the emails my brain shuts down. One of the most damning words seems to be 'trick'. Now I know what a 'trick' is in some professions, but apparently in scientific lingo it means something else. Who knows?
I can certainly appreciate the immense pressure on climate scientists to speed up the process, since it has become such an urgent political movement. That does not mean that their research is seriously flawed, or that every climate scientist's research is flawed. I suspect we will learn a great deal more about this in the coming weeks.
But in the meantime, we have to move forward with a serious environmental agreement, that will provide necessary funds to smaller countries already impacted by the rise in temperature.
We also have to question why Stephen Harper is telling us one thing and then telling foreign reporters something completely different. And why he is putting so much of our money into climate denial instead of making a binding commitment to the environment.
However, environmental activist Richard Graves, brings up another important aspect of this scandal. Espionage and criminal activity.
Some environmental leaders have been working to minimize the scandal of ClimateGate, by focusing on the fact the hacked email archive of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit has nothing, besides a few cherry-picked quotes taken out of context, that casts a shadow of a doubt upon validity of modern climate science. They are wrong. ClimateGate is a huge scandal, probably bigger than they even imagine.
The real scandal is not the email archive, or even how it was acquired, sorted, and uploaded to a Russian server, but rather the emerging evidence of a coordinated international campaign to target and harass climate scientists, break and enter into government climate labs, and misrepresent climate science through a sophisticated media infrastructure on the eve of the international climate talks.
One leaked archive could have been the result of an aggrieved staff member or rogue hacker, out to grind a political axe or wreak revenge upon a colleague. However, the University of Victoria was targeted in a similar attack, when two people disguised as network computer technicians attempted to penetrate the security of the facility and access the data servers of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis. When challenged by an employee, the two individuals fled the scene.
"This is disturbing news and it shows that there is an organized criminal campaign that is going to great lengths to infiltrate secure facilities and steal private data," said Jim Hoggan, author of the new book Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming. "We don't know who is behind these criminal acts, but we hope they will eventually be unmasked by police."
This campaign has been proved to be international in scope, with criminal acts of breaking and entering probable in both the UK and Canada, as well as coordinated with the sophisticated communications infrastructure founded and built by former tobacco lobbyists that were hired by fossil fuel interests, such as ExxonMobil, to cast doubt on the links between the sale and use of fossil fuels and the changing of the world's climate. This infrastructure was detailed by within Hoggan's book, as well as documented in extensive detail by projects like Exxonsecrets.org.
One major mistake these groups, including ClimateDepot and Newsbusters, made was in labeling this manufactured crisis as ClimateGate. Perhaps a little history is in order, as almost no news reports even referenced the fact that the Watergate scandal centered around the breaking and entering of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel, by a group of right-wing shadow operatives that a subsequent investigation by the FBI connected to the 1972 Committee to Re-elect the President, CREEP.
President Nixon was exposed as having commissioned the break-in, to uncover the state of the Democratic party, as he had given into fears of electoral defeat and resorted to desperate and criminal measures. Pioneering reporters Woodward and Bernstein made history for exposing the criminal conspiracy at the heart of the White House.
Conspiracy theory has recently become mainstream within the conservative movement in the United States, with both media figures and politicians implying that President Obama falsified his birth records, is setting up death panels to euthanize seniors, or impose communism upon the people of the United States.
The two policy issues that have aroused the most conspiracy theory have been Healthcare reform and Clean Energy Reform, with hugely profitable insurance and fossil fuel companies funding massive lobbying and disinformation campaigns. The Center for Public Integrity recently detailed the massive expansion in lobbying by polluting energy interests, leading to over 1,150 lobbying groups buying influence as the U.S. Congress sought to pass the Waxman-Markey climate bill.
The actual dollar amount spent is unknown, as disclosure laws require few details and have huge loopholes, but the Center calculated that an extremely conservative estimate would give you a minimum figure of more than $27 million dollars spent in direct lobbying from April to June of this year. In a major and still unfolding scandal, Bonner and Associates, an astroturf lobbying organization contracted to the coal industry's trade association, falsified letters to lawmakers from local civil rights, veterans, and other groups opposing federal climate legislation. This comes on top of the documented campaign of industrial espionage against environmental organizations, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, that was exposed last year by Mother Jones magazine.
The picture painted by these facts lead to the open question to if, as huge amounts of corporate money started being spent in unregulated funds, including to ethically compromised contractors and security firms, to defeat federal and international climate regulations, some of that money was diverted to fund a criminal conspiracy?
Could there be a criminal campaign to break into the climate research centers of foreign governments, review their archives for damaging snippets of text, and then elevate a fringe conspiracy theory that climate change is a hoax by the world's scientists, civil society organizations, and governments to impose socialism upon the people of the world? If so, this story would be an eerie and ironic echo of Michael Crichton's "State of Fear" that was embraced by many of the same groups currently promoting the ClimateGate talking points.
However, most journalists seem content to play into the false balance trap that has served the opponents of climate action so well over the years, by looking only at cherry-picked quotes and disinformation turned out by the climate denial industry. While the surface parallels between Watergate and ClimateGate may be strong, to uncover the truth will require a serious investigation by media, law enforcement, or even international security organizations.
An investigation into who is coordinating, funding, and leading a last-ditch effort to stall climate legislation through the use of criminal tactics and a well-funded and coordinated disinformation campaign seems to be beyond the capacity of the field of journalism. An industry so critically wounded by budget and staffing cuts that it is perhaps unable or unwilling to spend the resources or staff time to tackle serious investigative issues, even if the direction of a policy critical to the future development of the global economy depends on the outcome.
If so, the question remains, who will get to the bottom of ClimateGate? This could be a scandal bigger than anybody has imagined.
Twenty three ambassadors have stepped forward to defend Richard Colvin, while Peter Mackay continues to get caught in one lie after another.
The Reformers have made this thing so ugly that I took another look at what we are doing in Afghanistan, and realized it's time to get out. It is not a mission, it's a war. It is not a humanitarian effort and it has not improved the lives of the Afghan people.
You can view several of the documents here, but the more I read the more I believe that Peter MacKay needs to be shown the door. Not just demoted but removed from government altogether. He may be looking at a war crimes trial in the near future, so he should go home and rest up. He's an absolute disgrace.
Not that it lets Harper, O'Connor or anyone else who saw those reports off the hook, but it's a good place to start.
Twenty-three former ambassadors are speaking out against the Conservative government's attacks on the credibility of diplomat Richard Colvin, saying Ottawa's response to his Afghan detainee abuse testimony threatens to cast a chill over Canada's foreign service.
The ex-heads of Canadian diplomatic missions say in a letter released to the media that they're worried the treatment of Mr. Colvin will discourage diplomats from reporting frankly to Ottawa from their foreign postings.
Retired ambassadors rarely speak as a group on government issues - and there was extensive debate about whether they should this time.
Paul Durand, a former Canadian ambassador to the Organization of American States, to Chile and to Costa Rica, said the former ambassadors are speaking only on the way Mr. Colvin has been treated by the government - and especially Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who was Mr. Colvin's boss as foreign affairs minister.
"He savaged him in public, and ridiculed him. And that's not the way to treat a guy who's doing his job," Mr. Durand said. "He is not a whistleblower. He was hauled before a parliamentary committee and had to state the truth.
"I'm not getting into detainees and whether there was torture or not. But I do suggest that anyone who thought people weren't being maltreated and tortured in an Afghan prison is hopelessly naive. And I don't think [the Conservatives] are."
Ottawa has to be prepared to hear things it doesn't like, the letter said.
"The Colvin affair risks creating a climate in which officers may be more inclined to report what they believe headquarters wants to hear, rather than facts and perceptions deemed unpalatable," the ex-ambassadors say.
In the case of Mr. Colvin, this was early warnings that prisoners that Canada turned over to Afghanistan's notorious intelligence service faced torture. The Tories and the military have suggested the diplomat was duped by the Taliban into writing what they call groundless reports.
"A fundamental requirement of a foreign service officer is that he or she report on a given situation as observed or understood," the former heads of mission said. "It is only in this way that any government can draw conclusions knowledgeably and make its considered decisions, even if at variance with the reports received."
Most of the former ambassadors who signed the letter are career diplomats and have served in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America.
John Noble, a former ambassador to Greece and Switzerland, said government attacked Mr. Colvin like a partisan opponent.
"Civil servants can't really defend themselves the way that politicians are supposed to," he said.
Mr. Colvin, who was posted to Afghanistan for 17 months, told a Commons committee in November that all detainees handed over to Afghan authorities in 2006 and early 2007 were likely tortured, even though many were innocent.
He told MPs that he began his warnings in June, 2006, and that by mid-2007, higher-ups in Ottawa began censoring his reports.
In response, the Harper government suggested Mr. Colvin was recycling Taliban propaganda.
"We are being asked to accept testimony from people who throw acid in the faces of schoolchildren and who blow up buses of civilians in their own country," Defence Minister Peter MacKay told the Commons Nov. 19. Retired general Rick Hillier called Mr. Colvin's allegations of widespread torture "ludicrous."
However, the Canadian government trusts Mr. Colvin on sensitive matters. He is currently a senior intelligence officer at Canada's embassy in Washington.
The statement by the ex-ambassadors is an attempt to speak against what they consider a dangerous precedent. However, a group representing a far bigger pool of former ambassadors, the Retired Heads of Mission Association, was unable to reach a consensus on issuing such a statement.
"The issues raised by the Richard Colvin affair are profound," the ex-ambassadors said.
Colvin, a foreign service officer dedicated to discharging his responsibilities to the best of his ability under difficult circumstances, was unfairly subjected to personal attacks as a result of his testimony provided in response to a summons from a parliamentary committee.
"While criticism of his testimony was perfectly legitimate, aspersions cast on his personal integrity were not."
The letter is being circulated by Gar Pardy, who has served as Canada's ambassador in Central America. He said it's "shabby politics" for the government and military to attack a diplomat for responding to an inquiry's request for testimony.
He said several more former heads of mission have expressed support since the statement was released.
Mr. Pardy said smart statecraft in Ottawa relies on their foreign diplomats delivering accurate intelligence.
"You have to have some expectation that they're providing you with accurate information," he said. "If you don't have that in the foreign service, you've got a problem."
This whole HST fiasco is getting stranger by the minute.
Federal NDP leader Jack Layton and Provincial "I have no idea what this party is but definitely not Progressive' leader Tim Hudak, have teamed up in theory to make attacking the HST the basis for their next election campaign.
In the case of Hudak, he's already started, and in fact has lost complete control of his party, who are now acting like nuts.
But this gets weirder.
The HST for Ontario and BC was the brainchild (I use the term loosely) of the federal finance minister Jim Flaherty. Jim's wife is a member of Hudak's caucus, that is now attacking Jim's plan.
And yet Stephen Harper, who is seen in this video lauding the HST, has put the onus on Michael Ignatieff who now must wear the tax. Boy, who ever said politics wasn't for the faint of heart, sure got that right.
The debate over the switch to a harmonized sales tax has given both the federal NDP and the Ontario Progressive Conservatives a chance to show off their considerable skills at populist spin. But that isn't serving the public. The arguments in favour of the HST are several and strong, but they're also dry and technical. The arguments against, however, can be summed up in cheap slogans and fearmongering.
The Ontario Tories call it the Dalton Sales Tax, after Ontario's Liberal premier; the federal Liberals used to call it the Harper Sales Tax, after the Tory prime minister. Opposition parties oppose, even when there's really no ideologically sound reason to do so.
Yes, the move to an HST does mean that some products will have higher sales tax than they do now. But we'll all be paying less income tax, and low-income Ontarians will get extra tax credits to compensate. Overall, economists are saying that the reform of Ontario's taxes should benefit businesses, employees and consumers. The province's current tax climate is unnecessarily punitive to business, and that hurts the economy as a whole.
The big difference between the HST and the status quo is that the HST is reimbursed at every stage of the supply chain. So an Ontario business will no longer pay sales tax on machinery and raw materials. That's a huge benefit. In theory, businesses can pass those savings on to consumers through lower prices. That doesn't necessarily mean they will, but if competition does get fierce, a business will have more room in the profit margin to use lower prices as a way to hold on to customers.
Lower taxes also mean that businesses will find Ontario a more attractive place to locate.
Since we're competing with the rest of the world, that's a key consideration. A report by Jack M. Mintz, of the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, said Ontario's planned tax reforms will lead to the creation of 591,000 net new jobs within 10 years.
Mintz also points out that the reforms will even the playing field between different sectors of the economy, and that will make doing business in Ontario more efficient and productive.
The Ontario government hasn't done a very good job of explaining all this, so it's no wonder people are getting nervous about the HST. It doesn't help that any conversation about it tends to be drowned out by shouting from the opposition.
Ontario Tory MPPs Randy Hillier and Bill Murdoch embarrassed themselves and their party when they staged a petulant sit-in in the Ontario legislature. When Hillier turned from activism to politics, it seemed he had learned that working within the democratic system can be more effective than staging silly stunts. Unfortunately for his constituents, it seems he's reverted to his old ways.
As Stéphane Dion learned, any attempt at tax reform -- even a smart attempt -- can always be spun as a "new tax" or a "tax grab." Ontario's tax reform proposal might not be perfect, but it's an improvement on the status quo. All parties should respect the facts, and the province's taxpayers, as they discuss the pros and cons.
The Canadian media has not yet picked up this story, or maybe are ignoring it; but Stephen Harper told Bloomberg Press that he will use his position at the G20 to halt climate change talks.
He will try to convince them that the economy comes first, despite the fact that our economy certainly does not come first with him.
So all his talk about going to Copenhagen to address this, was all talk. He'll go for the photo-ops, but not much else.
The above is from the Liberal Party's 'anywhere but Copenhagen contest'. You can check it out here. Some of them are very funny and very creative. This is one of my favourite's.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he will use Canada’s co-chairmanship of next year’s Group of 20 countries meeting to urge members to put economic recovery before efforts to protect the environment.
“Without the wealth that comes from growth, the environmental threats, the developmental challenges and the peace and security issues facing the world will be exponentially more difficult to deal with,” Harper said in an address to South Korea’s National Assembly.
Harper is in Seoul, his last stop on an Asian tour, to discuss with South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak how the G20 conference they’re co-chairing in Canada will advance efforts to coordinate a global recovery. The remarks were made ahead of global climate change talks starting today in Copenhagen. Toronto will host the next G20 summit on June 26 and 27, and the following summit will be in Seoul in November, Lee and Harper said today in their meeting.
Participants at the Copenhagen conference, including Lee, Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama, said last month that their original goal of completing a climate accord at the meeting was out of reach.
About 190 nations will gather in the Danish capital until Dec. 18 to set a framework for a treaty to curb emissions blamed for global warming. Talks have been slowed by differences between industrialized nations such as the U.S. and developing countries, including India and China, over emissions-reduction targets and how much financial help rich nations should provide to poor ones.
I remember several years ago in the midst of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a young Afghan boy had arrived in Kingston for surgery. Coverage in our local paper went on for days, tracking the little guy's recovery. He became the face of that war for us.
The above video is part IV of the documentary 'Rethink Afghanistan' and deals with the devastating affects of this war. Let's not kid ourselves. This is a war and innocent civilians are being killed. And now that we could be facing war crimes, it's time to get out.
OTTAWA – Federal officials assured the Red Cross in 2006 that Canada would take an active role in monitoring the fate of Afghan prisoners – but for critical months behind the scenes did little more than manage the political spin, secret memos show.
The records, examined on a confidential basis by The Canadian Press, show the Harper government placed a greater emphasis on drafting "key messages" to the public and preparing "approaches" for embarrassing disclosures than on dealing with the human rights of prisoners.
Throughout 2006, when Canada took on its combat role in Kandahar, the International Red Cross pressed Ottawa to take more responsibility for prisoners captured by Canadian soldiers.
At the time, federal officials were receiving warnings about torture in Afghan prisoners from Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin. The Red Cross also met directly with a military lawyer, an RCMP officer, as well as another foreign affairs staffer in Kandahar.
And on Nov. 20, 2006, Foreign Affairs officials drafted talking points meant to assure officials of the humanitarian agency.
"Canada is reflecting on how to engage more pro-actively with Afghan and international authorities on the issue of treatment of detainees, including asking the Government of Afghanistan for permission to visit the prisons, discussing with Afghan authorities the process and procedures for handling and treating detainees from transfer to arrival at final detention facility, and talking to the (Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission)," say the talking points.
The document also warned officials to prepare "an interdepartmental approach" for dealing with "the potential scenario where allegations of mistreatment or torture are substantiated."
A prisoner-transfer agreement between Ottawa and the Afghan government in December 2005 (signed by Rick Hillier in the middle of an election campaign) did not allow Canada the automatic right to check on the welfare of those the army had captured.
That Canada was considering even an ad-hoc monitoring regime would have been welcome news to the Red Cross.
Despite those assurances, officials in Ottawa placed the notion of formally monitoring prisoners at the bottom of a "Strategic (Macro) Level Engagement" plan produced near the end of February 2007.
No. 1 on the eight-point plan for officials was to "Prepare standard key messages (ie. importance of adhering to obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law regarding the treatment of detainees.)"
Point No. 8 in the plan was to "consider supplementing the existing arrangement" in such a way to include the "guarantee of access for Canadian authorities to individuals transferred by the (Canadian Forces)."
In March 2007, the federal government did ask the Afghan human-rights commission to check on the welfare of prisoners, but the chronically underfunded agency had trouble getting into detention centres.
The Harper government eventually decided on full-blown Canadian monitoring, but only after being rocked by published allegations that prisoners handed over to Afghan intelligence may have been abused.
Federal officials have since acknowledged in testimony before a House of Commons committee that Canada has no idea whether prisoners were tortured during the 2006-07 time frame because monitoring didn't take place.
A respected former diplomat was aghast that "developing the spin" would take priority over dealing with an issue as urgent as possible torture.
"This is one of those situations where – once again – presentation has taken the place of substance," said Louis Delvoie, Canada's former high commissioner to Pakistan.
"It's a rather sad commentary on what is taking place. You (should) deal with the substance of an issue and then you develop the communications plan as a separate and subsequent item to explain how you're doing it and what you're doing."
He said this is not the kind of conduct Canadians should expect from their government in wartime.
Errol Mendes, a human-rights law expert, said the paper trail demonstrates that the Harper government viewed the war as a political exercise, where image-branding trumped policy.
"Throughout all of this the military has been used as a political prop and that is dangerous," he said.
"Governments come and go but the military as an institution remains and the damage this kind of approach can leave is severe."
The paper trail shows Canadians were presented in the fall of 2006 with an alternative to handing over prisoners to an uncertain fate in the hands of the Afghans.
Other NATO allies were clamouring to set up a prisoner camp adjacent to Kandahar Airfield.
As the winter of 2006-07 settled in, Canadian officials began to hear abuse concerns from more than just the Red Cross.
British and Dutch forces, who followed the Canadians into southern Afghanistan, were "deeply frustrated" even though their agreements with Kabul allowed them more access to prisoners.
"UK/Dutch pol/mil colleagues lament that they are unable to track their detainees," said a Dec. 4, 2006, memo viewed by The Canadian Press.
"It is unclear whether they are tortured, held beyond legal limits, or (all too frequently) released back to battlefield."
The Allies were worried "the detainee issue could explode at any moment into a political firestorm."
The notion of setting up a NATO-run prison camp was sounded rejected by Canada, partly on the advice of Colvin, defence sources said.
At the time, officials were putting a lot of stock into the idea that the Afghan government would take the handling of detainees away from the National Directorate of Security and hand prisoners over to a special camp run by the army.
But Afghan Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak eventually sank the proposal.
For much of my adult life I tended to vote Progressive Conservative. In Kingston, Flora MacDonald did a great job representing our interests, so it was a clear choice for me.
However, when Peter Mckay betrayed the Party and made a deal with the devil to merge us with the Reform/Alliance; I opted out.
In 2004 and 2006, I voted NDP, and still have a great deal of respect for the Party and it's leader. However, if we really want to get this new Conservative Party out of office, before they totally destroy our integrity, I have to now back the party with the best chance of doing that. The Liberal Party of Canada.
I am a Baby Boomer, having grown up through many periods of social upheavel. However, I believe that as a nation we have moved forward and I can no longer simply sit back and watch it be destroyed.
With Harper continuing to play games, the government in waiting is no longer standing by. Michael Ignatieff unveiled the Liberal plan, and some of the country's top environmentalists were very pleased.
