Pen Meets Paper Mar.22'10

Opinion by Helge Nome
The Canadian Parliament is currently heading for an internal showdown. Relations between the governing conservatives and the various opposition parties have been on a downhill trend for a number of years now and the latest bone of contention is the alleged cover up of reports from Afghanistan on the torture of prisoners handed over to Afghan authorities by Canadian troops on the ground there. These reports were made by top level Canadian diplomats working in that country and allegedly ignored or dismissed by bureaucrats and government ministers in Ottawa.
Parliamentarians have asked that these reports be made available to them for perusal and the government has responded with concerns over sensitive information regarding security issues. A predictable response if you don’t want to release information.
All this in the wake of the Prime Minister pro-rouging (suspending) parliament over the winter “to get more time to work on the budget”.
Some people argue that the Prime Minister of Canada is effectively a dictator, along with the non-elected people in his office. There is a lot of substance to this claim, validated by an article on the front page of The Globe and Mail on January 23 this year. Titled “Canada’s man in Tehran was a CIA spy” it goes on: “Breaking a 30 year silence, the diplomat praised for sheltering Americans during the Iranian Revolution tells the Globe he was made ‘de facto CIA station chief’ in a secret deal between U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Prime Minister Joe Clark.”
What makes this a particularly troubling incident is that the diplomat in question, Ken Taylor, was the Canadian Ambassador to Iran at the time, not just some embassy employee operating on the sly.
Think about it: Our official Canadian representative to a foreign nation is hired to be the local head of the primary spy agency of another nation with the approval of our Prime Minister of the day! In our national anthem we sing about “the true north strong and free”. It would appear that this freedom is claimed by our Prime Minister, at the expense of the rest of us.