Canada’s Conservatives shut down
parliament, again
Conservative
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has requested and received from Governor-General
Michaëlle Jean an order proroguing or shutting down Canada’s parliament
until March 3.
The
minority Conservative government’s principal, albeit unstated, reason for
proroguing parliament for the second time in twelve calendar months is to
prevent further parliamentary hearings into the Canadian state’s complicity in
torture.
These
hearings, despite the support of all three opposition parties for Canada’s
leading role in the counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan, are damaging the
public stature of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and disrupting the Canadian
elite’s plans to advance their interests through participation in imperialist
wars.
Last
month, Richard Colvin, a former top Canadian diplomat in Afghanistan, told the
House of Commons foreign affairs committee that the government and CAF had
ignored and suppressed his repeated warnings that Afghan security forces were
abusing and torturing alleged Taliban prisoners—including the hundreds of
prisoners whom the CAF transferred to them in 2006 and the first half of 2007.
Colvin further testified that most of those handed over by the Canadian
military to Afghanistan’s notorious National Directorate of Security were
peasants and other ordinary folk caught up in CAF sweeps. “In other words,”
declared Colvin, “we detained, and handed over for severe torture, a lot of
innocent people.”
The
government—Harper and his ministers, the top brass of the Canadian Armed
Forces, and senior government bureaucrats—responded to Colvin’s testimony with
a campaign of disinformation and slander. They accused him of being a
know-nothing and Taliban dupe, if not a Taliban sympathizer. (See “Canada’s
Conservatives respond to Afghan torture charges with lies and slurs”)
The claims
of the Conservative government and Canada’s military that prior to May 2007
they had no reason to believe Afghan security forces were practicing torture
were never credible. Even the US State Department had publicly acknowledged
that the Afghan state routinely practiced torture.
But in
recent weeks further evidence, including from CAF documents, has come to light
substantiating key elements of Colvin’s testimony. Meanwhile, opinion polls
have shown that a majority of Canadians believe Colvin, not the Conservatives
and the military and that popular support for the CAF intervention in
Afghanistan has declined still further.
The
termination of the current parliamentary session was announced not by Harper,
but by his press secretary, Dimitri Soudas, and through a hastily organized
press conference on the afternoon of December 30, that is smack in the middle
of the holiday season.
This
furtiveness is in keeping with the government’s anti-democratic actions and
intent.
By
shutting down parliament, the Conservatives hope to avoid further exposure of
their and the CAF’s complicity in criminality. Not only is the Canadian state’s
complicity in torture abhorrent; it constitutes a crime under international
law. Under the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to transfer prisoners if
one has reason to believe their new captors will subject them to torture.
In
Wednesday’s conference call, Soudas tartly dismissed the suggestion that the
government’s shutting down of parliament was driven by its determination to
scuttle further hearings into the Afghan detainee issue.
“The answer
is no,” said Soudas. “The committee … has found absolutely no evidence of
wrongdoing by Canadian soldiers, diplomats and the armed forces.”
In fact
there is a mountain of evidence. If only a tiny portion has yet seen the light
of day, it is because the government is using all the means at its disposal to
suppress it.
Colvin was
threatened with possible prosecution under the country’s new, draconian
national security laws if he appeared before a Military Police Complaints
Commission inquiry, prompted by complaints from Amnesty International and the
B.C. Civil Liberties Association, into the Afghan detainee issue. (The Military
Police Complaints Commission or MPCC is a quasi-judicial oversight body
established by parliament.)
Learning
of Colvin’s predicament, the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, which
like parliament itself has a majority of opposition MPs, invited him to appear
before it.
Other
examples of the government campaign to suppress any and all investigation of
the Afghan detainee issue include:
·
The government’s unsuccessful attempt
to have the courts shut down the MPCC inquiry into the treatment of Afghan
detainees on the grounds that it does not have jurisdiction in the matter.
·
The government’s refusal to hand over
to the MPCC in timely fashion the documents it needs to pursue its inquiry; the
few that have been handed over have been heavily redacted, often with entire
pages blacked out.
·
The government’s refusal on national
security grounds to provide the foreign affairs committee with the documents
pertaining to the Afghan detainee issue and its subsequent decision to
challenge the powers of parliament by defying a House of Commons motion
instructing it to provide the committee with the requisite documents.
·
A Conservative boycott of the foreign
affairs committee for much of December that deprived it of a quorum and thereby
of its formal powers.
The
pattern is clear: the government has gone to extraordinary lengths, defying and
now shutting down parliament, to derail any inquiry into the Afghan detainee
issue.
Unable to
explain the government’s real reasons for proroguing parliament, Soudas
justified it by claiming that the Conservatives want to consult with Canadians
on their post-recession agenda before delivering a new budget one day after
parliament reconvenes.
Harper’s
press secretary also noted that parliament would likely have been suspended for
much of February due to the Vancouver Winter Olympics.
The only
truth in all this is that the government wants to deny its political opponents
a platform for the next two months. Then in the afterglow of the Olympics,
which the Conservatives intend to use to whip up Canadian patriotism and
showcase various ministers, they will introduce a budget. Depending on their
showing in the opinion polls, this budget could well serve as the government’s
platform for a bid for a parliamentary majority in a spring election.
Twice in
little over a year the Conservative government has resorted to shutting down
parliament in an attempt to extricate itself from political difficulties.
In
December 2008, Harper, through the office of the un-elected and unaccountable
Governor-General and with the overwhelming support of Canada’s corporate elite,
carried out a veritable constitutional coup. In flagrant violation of
democratic norms and parliamentary convention, the minority Conservatives shut
down parliament so as to prevent the opposition from exercising its democratic
right to defeat them in a non-confidence vote—and this less than two months
after a national election had given no party a majority and just two weeks
after parliament had first been called into session.
Today, by
contrast, the opposition parties are not threatening to defeat the government.
Indeed, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has all but given Harper and his
Conservatives a blank check, declaring repeatedly in end-of-the-year interviews
that his party has no intention of precipitating an election in 2010. The pro-Quebec
independence Bloc Québécois (BQ) has for the past four years of Conservative
rule repeatedly justified “conjunctural” support for the Harper government on
the grounds that that is the best means to “advance the interests” of Quebec.
As for the trade union-supported NDP, it came to the government’s rescue last
fall, abstaining on a non-confidence motion, and has repeatedly signaled its
readiness to collaborate more closely with the Conservatives in the name of
“making parliament work.”
In
Canada’s British-derived parliamentary system, the government has broad control
over parliament’s agenda and calendar. This includes under most circumstances
the right to terminate a parliamentary session.
That said,
yesterday’s proroguing of parliament was certainly in the service of
reactionary and anti-democratic ends: to suppress exposure of the Canadian
state’s complicity in torture, bolster Canada’s participation in the
colonial-style insurgency war in Afghanistan, and lay more favorable conditions
for the coming to power of a majority Conservative government committed to
waging imperialist war abroad and gutting what remains of the welfare state at
home.
Furthermore,
it need be noted, both last year in countering the opposition’s threat to oust
them from office and this year in their drive to derail any inquiry into
Canada’s treatment of Afghan detainees, the Conservatives have openly appealed
to extreme right wing forces.
Last year,
the Conservatives sought to whip up Anglo-chauvinism, with their charge that
the Liberals and the “socialists” (the NDP) were consorting with the
“separatists” (the BQ).
In recent
weeks, the Conservatives have accused the opposition of maligning the military,
Harper going so far as to give a speech on a CAF ship which was clearly aimed
at rallying the support of the military and using it to intimidate his
bourgeois opponents. Declared the Conservative Prime Minister, “Living as we
do, in a time when some in the political arena do not hesitate before throwing
the most serious of allegations at our men and women in uniform, based on the
most flimsy of evidence, remember that Canadians from coast to coast to coast
are proud of you and stand behind you, and I am proud of you, and I stand
beside you.”
Liberal
House Leader Ralph Goodale called yesterday’s proroguing of parliament “a
shocking insult to democracy.” NDP Leader Jack Layton said Canada has “a
serious democratic deficit in addition to a whopping economic deficit.”
But these
parties—which last year proposed to replace the Conservatives with a
Liberal-led coalition committed to “fiscal responsibility,” implementing
Harper’s $50 billion corporate tax cut plan, and waging war in Afghanistan
through 2011—are incapable of mounting a genuine, popular and progressive
struggle against the Conservatives’ stoking of reaction and increasing use of
anti-democratic methods.
Last year
their protest over Harper’s constitutional coup barely lasted 24 hours and
neither party breathed a word of criticism of the reactionary office of the
Governor-General and its vast arbitrary powers.
In
response to the Conservatives’ insinuations that they are in bed with the
Taliban, the Liberals and NDP have been reduced to bleating that they “stand
with the troops” and that the government’s indifference to torture is “damaging
the mission.” In reality, the mission—stabilizing the US occupation of
Afghanistan and expanding NATO into oil rich Central Asia—is itself a criminal
enterprise from which torture and other war crimes necessarily arise.
This author also recommends:
One year since
Canada’s constitutional coup
Canada’s
Conservatives respond to Afghan torture charges with lies and slurs
Canada complicit
in torture of hundreds of Afghan detainees