Precedents & The Way Forward On Torture

Precedents: Parliamentary-wise, first one now two from Australia with some of our SCC precedents to come, which ties in nicely with court precedents in the UK, as noted by a sharp-eyed reader. Politically, if necessary, the Opposition should consider my suggestion on committee membership, as a way to bullet-proof themselves and put further pressure on Govt by exposing security BS as just that, BS.

In the medium to long-term, depending on just badly the Govt continues to handle this issue, the question will arise again about election and post-election strategy. I see the public is much more rational on this question than that misguided minority of nervous nellies that took control of the party last January and their supporters in the blogosphere. Obviously, Con supporters are opposed to all three options as all three threaten them, and likewise, a majority of Bloc supporters reject the two options that would most threaten the Bloc, and the only option favoured by a slim majority of Greens is that which would most profit the Greens by reducing competition and allowing them to effectively take the NDP's place. The coalition option is the only one favoured by a majority of Bloc supporters, and a good majority at that, and that again is entirely logical. As previously noted, in our current system and with our current parties, a coalition government will only occur because Libs and NDP need Bloc support to form government. Were the number of Lib + NDP seats to exceed 155, then the Libs could form the government and govern vote by vote like Martin, and that being the case, might be willing to conclude an accord with the NDP so as to guarantee a measure of security for a certain period, given we would be negotiating from a position of relative strength ("we can do accord or not, Jack, if not we'll just play it by ear and if you defeat us you'll pay the price for giving Cons chance to get back in - again"). However, given the Lib leadership's view of the world (and I mean leadership in largest sense here, caucus & apparatchiks), and relative strength in such a scenario, a coalition would be out of the question. This is not my view, I'm with PET's 1980 pro-coalition precedent on this, and in the abstract there's a 64-35 split among Liberal voters who agree with PET & me.

But the real question is what is to be done if the combined Lib-NDP seats aren't 155+? This is highly possible, to say the least. I have repeated the need to stop this government and end Harper's political career so as to safeguard Canadian democracy: "When a pyromaniac is intent on burning down one's house, and in the act, one has to both stop the fire and stop the pyromaniac. Fulfilling only one of these two conditions would ensure the burning of one's house, now or later." I hence favour a Lib-NDP coalition, necessarily with Bloc support - whence the Bloc electorate's enthusiasm. Given, as noted, the leadership's natural inclinations, this can only happen when we Libs are determined to replace the government because of an existential issue, like democracy or the survival of the party itself. Again, the OLO, having now known the real exigencies of responsibility and actually understanding what they're dealing with in Harper, seem to be finally swinging around to the view of Chrétien, Rae, Kennedy, Dion & myself on this matter. Reid summarised this view with "Kill him. Kill him dead". There is an exceedingly important point for all the nervous nellies to understand, well enunciated by Robinson: The very fact of having power fundamentally alters the dynamics of the political situation in favour of those who possess it. American author Ron Suskind reported a conversation with an official in the heyday of the Bush administration who told him, "when we act, we create our own reality." The quote inspired much derision, but the official was not entirely wrong. Governments do have the ability to shape events: they set the political agenda, determine the patterns of discourse, and dispense cash and patronage. Canadians might have said that they did not want a coalition, but once they had one, the situation would have changed fundamentally."

At the beginning of this scandal, now crisis, I wrote a fairly prescient piece, if I say so myself. In its conclusion I mentioned some essential democratic reforms as the raison d'être for an eventual coalition. Of these various reforms, electoral reform, is the most essential, and the only plausible reform, given the state of Canadian opinion and its resistance to change, is preferential voting. I have gone over the reasons for this at length (read all the links) and found a way to do it, should any Lib-led government lack the guts to ram it through: "non binding plebiscite".

In conclusion, here is my previous prescient conclusion:
"MPs are referred to as Honourable because there's an understanding that they will conduct themselves as honourable men, otherwise the whole system will collapse. And now we see that a small group of radical right-wingers are following the most bad faith examples of the most radical American right-wing ideologues, using the worst 21st century tactics to effectively destroy our institutions, built on Burkean assumptions of respect for tradition. They are wolves in sheep's clothing, declaiming their affections for our most tradition-imbued institutions (military, the Crown) even as they rip apart very fabric that underlies and gives a sense to all those institutions. There is only one way to deal with wolves. Given this existential threat, the coalition may well again see the light of day, and as I have repeatedly advocated, if our democracy is to survive and thrive, not as a Potemkin Parliament but as real, healthy body, we must absolutely reform the electoral system to make effective our final possible brake on an aggressive executive, and then from there, proceed with a careful reestablishment of our major institutions, the Judicial (independence of nomination) and Legislative Branches (multi-party conventions on variable party discipline on House votes), as well as somehow doing what we can to restore our Public Service to its past past glory as a fearless, independent advisor to and implementor of Government policy."