Thought for the Day

[bcholmes]

What we do these days in Ottawa is keep score. Everyone does it. Nobody seems able to stop. The first question, in the overheated office buildings around Parliament Hill, isn't whether something is true or false, a good idea or bad: it's whether it will help the Conservatives or the opposition. And if this week's problem isn't enough to knock the Harper Conservatives off their pedestal, then everyone — the entire capital hive-mind, Conservatives, Liberals, on-air analysts, swiftly scribbling scribes — moves on.

I prefer to believe there are a lot of Canadians who care more whether they’re governed well or poorly than whether by Conservatives or Liberals. The incessant scorekeeping of Hill denizens is profoundly off topic. And never more so than when Richard Colvin testified about his attempts in 2006 and 2007 to alert the government about allegations that Afghan prisoners handed over to Afghan authorities by Canadian Forces had been tortured.

Colvin is a career diplomat who is trusted enough, today, by this Conservative government to serve as head of intelligence at the Canadian Embassy in Washington. When Glyn Berry, a Canadian diplomat assigned to the Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar, was killed by a car bomb in 2006, it was Colvin who volunteered to replace him. This guy has literally risked his life for his country. Of course he’s fallible like any of us. But I think he has earned a certain amount of respect.

But first, political Ottawa had to do to Colvin’s testimony what political Ottawa does, which is to keep score. I was on a TV panel a few minutes after he spoke, and all around me, friends and colleagues were trying to figure out whether Colvin’s testimony would help the Liberals in the polls. Or whether "ordinary Canadians" could spare any sympathy for a bunch of strangers with weird names in a desert somewhere who just happened to get carted off to the wrong stinking hell pit. Hours later at a birthday party, one of the hot topics of conversation was how long it would be before Michael Ignatieff's complex writings on torture would be used against him. (Answer: three days. The only surprise was that it was Janine Krieber, a disgruntled Liberal political spouse, who did it, instead of somebody from another party.)

— "Torture: all about scoring points", Paul Wells.

Comments

[cynthia1960]

Sigh. The disease that infests Washington DC and Sacramento moved north. Keeping score is the favorite game of pundits and politicians.