Little Stevie Wonderbush smacked down by Hoser House of Commons

[FORD]

MPs reject extending anti-terror provision

Juliet O’Neill and Andrew Mayeda
CanWest News Service

Tuesday, February 27, 2007



OTTAWA — A government bid to extend two controversial anti-terrorist measures was defeated 159 to 124 in the House of Commons Tuesday.

After the vote, Prime Minister Stephen Harper berated the Liberals for choosing "internal caucus politics over the national security of Canadians."

"Any party that doesn’t take the national security of Canadians seriously will never be chosen by Canadians to form the government of Canada,” he said outside the Commons.

But Liberal Leader Stephane Dion scoffed at the suggestion his party’s position would cost it votes in the next election.

"Mr. Harper is mistaken on this and on so many other issues. Canadians want ... a leader able to fight terrorism with determination and to be there to protect their rights with determination."

The Anti-Terrorist Act measures — preventive arrests and investigative hearings — contained a sunset clause which meant Parliament was required to review and extend them every three years. A vote in the Senate on the measures, which are set to expire on March 1, where the Liberals are in a large majority, now is a moot point.

The preventive arrest clause enables police to arrest suspects without warrant and detain them for several days without charge if authorities have reason to believe a terrorist act will be committed. The investigative hearings provision, meanwhile, allows judges to compel individuals to testify in terror cases.

Conservative and Liberal MPs played hardball politics right up to the last minute, with Liberal MPs Navdeep Bains and Omar Alghabra threatening Liberal party legal action against Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre for claiming Dion had “collapsed under the pressure” of extremists and terrorist sympathizers in his caucus.

Former justice minister Irwin Cotler abstained during the vote. And at least four of the dozen Liberals who were absent had said publicly the were against their party’s position: B.C. MPs Keith Martin and Don Bell and Toronto MPs Derek Lee and Roy Cullen.

Cotler said he did not expect to be punished for his abstention by Dion, who had turned the vote into a test of his leadership by ordering a whipped vote under which all available Liberals had to turn up and vote against the motion.

"He knew what I was going to do, we’ve been discussing it, there’s no surprises. The relationship is good. I understand his position, he understands my position."

During Tuesday’s question period, deputy Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff called for a commitment for reform of the anti-terrorist law and said Harper had “taken the low road” by smearing the Bains family in the days leading to the vote.

“This conduct erodes the trust necessary for all sides of the House to work constructively to improve Canada’s anti-terrorism laws,” Ignatieff said.

Liberal House leader Ralph Goodale was indignant about how the Conservatives had used a Vancouver Sun report that Bains’s father in law is on a possible witness list for an Air India investigative hearing. “How can Canadians trust their rights to such an expedient government of such obviously low character?” he asked in the Commons.

Harper shot back that it was Dion’s behaviour that had eroded trust in the Liberals.

He accused Dion of a flip-flop on the measures that had been introduced by the previous Liberal government in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, of denigrating the police, and ignoring prominent Liberals who supported an extension of the measures.

Among them were Cotler, Dion leadership rival Bob Rae, former public safety minister Anne McLellan and former deputy prime minister John Manley.

“It is time the leader of the Liberal party acted like Canadians should trust his judgment on national security issues,” Harper said.

Ottawa Citizen
© CanWest News Service 2007

Link (http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=e516837d-cf49-486b-a762-883f0c4e8d01)

[FORD]

Good job Canadians!!

Unfortunately, my gut tells me that the neocons are going to target Vancouver or Toronto (possibly Ottawa) for the next "terraist" attack which will be the excuse to invade Iran AND drag Canada kicking and screaming into the 4th Reich at the same time.

Should such a thing happen, I hope all these guys remember how they voted and why, and that the reality of that will not change despite the murderous psyops.

[WACF]

The bill needs to be reworked.
Conservatives and Liberal MPs had worked pretty hard to find a middle ground but Harper and Dion both chose to be hardheaded on this.

Keep in mind this bill was pushed into place by the Liberals themselves.

Right now we are dealing with the sunset clause put in place to revisit the bill...the Conservatives wanted a 3 year extension to help aid in the Air India investigation going on right now.
The Liberals have yet again impeded that investigation...If you like senerios...the way the Liberals have treated that bombing you would think they were involved.

[WACF]

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/editorialsletters/story.html?id=3ffbc4b0-1129-420b-8b1b-cd95b9d1e2e1

National security vs. Liberal ethno-politics

Jonathan Kay, National Post
Published: Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Last week's Parliamentary dust-up between Stephen Harper and Sikh- Canadian Liberal MP Navdeep Bains should have reminded Canadians of a similar melodrama that took place seven years ago.

In May, 2000, Liberal Cabinet ministers Paul Martin and Maria Minna attended a fund raising gala for the Federation of Associations of Canadian Tamils (FACT), a group the U.S. State Department and officials within CSIS have identified as a front for the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist militia waging civil war in Sri Lanka.

When Reform politicians challenged Martin and Minna on their attendance, Martin insisted the event was nothing more than a "celebration of dance." When that didn't fly, Liberals accused the Reform party of bigotry. Martin said his critics were a "lynch mob." Minna claimed that suspicions of FACT were motivated by anti-Tamil "racism." With more than 200,000 Tamil-Canadians to be courted, it looked as if the Liberals couldn't be bothered with the fine points of a foreign conflict that had claimed 60,000 lives and was being funded by millions of dollars collected annually by Tamil bagmen here in Canada.

In one important sense, it is unfair to lump Bains in with Martin and Minna: Bains isn't accused of consorting with anybody who's been linked to terrorism -- except at his own wedding. Last week's controversy erupted when Kim Bolan of the Vancouver Sun revealed that not only has Bains' father-in-law acted as a spokesmen for a Sikh terrorist group, he is also allegedly one of the people whom officials seek to question as part of the ongoing Air India investigation. Nevertheless, the underlying themes are the same as in 2000. Now, as then, the Liberals are accusing the Conservatives of racism. More credibly, the Conservatives are casting a light on the Liberals' addiction to ethno-politics, an addiction that could potentially threaten national security.

The majority view is that Harper overplayed his hand last Wednesday. Speaking during Question Period, he implied that Stephane Dion was forcing his caucus to oppose the extension of two provisions of the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act -- one of which permits officials to compel witnesses to appear before the Air India investigation -- in order to protect the family of an MP whose support was critical to Dion's victory at December's Liberal leadership convention in Montreal. Bains looked wounded, and the Liberals made a great show of comforting him for the press gallery.

But Harper may prove the long-run winner. Even if Bains' father-in-law has nothing to do with Dion's decision to oppose national security legislation that his own party drafted just five years ago, there is little doubt that certain ethnopolitical special interests are calling the shots here. Among veteran Liberal insiders, it is believed that the several hundred Sikh convention delegates Bains and his allies led into the Dion camp (via Gerard Kennedy) came with a price: an end to the investigative powers contained in the Anti-Terrorism Act, which was opposed for predictable reasons by various Sikh, Tamil and Muslim organizations.

Indeed, I am informed by a well-informed source that the critical deals were cut months in advance, and were driven by Bains -- and, in the case of Muslim delegates, by Arab-Canadian MP Omar Alghabra -- through Kennedy, who'd been staked out early by ethno-politicians as an empty vessel into which they could pour their parochial agendas.

These machinations should not be confined to history's footnotes: The Montreal Liberal convention was a close-fought thing, and the mass migration of hundreds of well-herded delegates along ethnic lines was likely the deciding factor. If more information comes out about unsavoury deals, Dion's image as a squeaky-clean enviro-wonk will erode, and traditional voter suspicion about sleazy Liberal ethno-politics will bubble to the surface. Given the high stakes -- we are, after all, talking about a law that could help us learn the truth about the greatest terrorist attack in Canadian history, as well as prevent even greater carnage in the future-- the issue could prove explosive.

No reasonable person opposes the participation of ethnic minorities in Canadian politics. What we should oppose, however, is ethnic delegates being manoeuvred en masse from one political camp to another by community leaders or their proxies.

Despite the brouhaha surrounding Bains, it is important to note that this is not just a Sikh issue. Various Muslim delegates to the Montreal convention, I am reliably informed, made it quite plain that their support was available to the candidate who said the nastiest things about Israel. (I cannot know what Michael Ignatieff 's frame of mind was when, one month earlier, he accused Israel of "war crimes" during a media interview. But for a man who'd previously declared that he wasn't "losing sleep" over Israel's response to Hezbollah's aggression, the tenor of his comments was odd to say the least.)

The 45 Tamil delegates, too, made their price plain. According to Muslim Canadian Congress founder Tarek Fatah, an early critic of the ethno-politics he witnessed in Montreal, Tamil delegates shunned Bob Rae when he properly told their leader -- a notorious Tiger apologist named Rev. Francis Xavier -- that, if elected prime minister, he wouldn't reverse Stephen Harper's principled decision to put the Tamil Tigers on Canada's list of officially banned terrorist groups.

Thanks to Rae's official recommendation in favour of an investigation into the 1985 Air India bombing, the former Ontario premier was shunned by Sikhs, as well. (A prominent organizer working for Bains circled the convention floor in Montreal, telling Sikhs that Rae was "bad for Sikhs.") To his great credit, Rae never backtracked in order to play the ethno-political game. And to this day, he remains one of the few high profile Liberals in favour of the expiring Anti-Terrorism Act provisions -- a fact that I believe will work in his favour at the next Liberal leadership convention.

(Muslims, too, vilified Rae in Montreal. As Tarek Fatah reported, the president of the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) circulated an e-mail to Muslim delegates warning them that Rae's wife is a member of a Jewish advocacy group, and that they shouldn't "elect a leader who supports apartheid." Alghabra, a former CAF president, stood by mute while these events unfolded.)

Today, Parliament is expected to vote on the expiring Anti-Terrorism Act provisions. And if everything goes to script, a whipped Liberal caucus will stand with the peacenik extremists in the Bloc and NDP to water down our national security -- all to cement dubious intra- Liberal alliances. It will be interesting to see how many Liberals (if any) have the guts to stand up to Dion, who's declared that he won't sign the nomination papers of any dissenters.

Being shunned by your own is a steep price to pay for a politician. But by paying it, principled Liberals will not only be striking a blow against terrorism, but also the corrosive scourge of ethno-politics eating away at their party.

[WACF]

On a side note:

The references in that article about racism at the Liberal leadership convention were sickening.

One of the activists actually went up to Bob Rae's wife(The Jew in question) without realizing who she was...and started to try and sway her to not vote for Rae..because of his joo wife.