The Fall Session Begins

The house is back in session and the focus during today's question period was violence - the future of the gun registry following the Dawson College shootings last week and Canada's mission in Afghanistan after news that 4 Canadian soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber on Monday.

Canada's minister of public safety, Stockwell Day, offered some wishy washy answers to questions about what the Conservatives plan to do with the gun registry. He kept citing the auditor general's report about its inefficiencies but offered no ideas on how to fix it. Day also failed to note that the the auditor general had also said in her report that the registry had actually been working well, despite the problems, and refused to recognize the fact that the Canadian Police Association supports it as well. Both Harper and Day, who believe they should listen to the gun lobby rather than the wishes of the Canadian people, will face tough opposition this fall if they keep pushing the abolition of the registry, most especially from Quebec where the Cons have steadily been losing ground - a fact that could cost them the next election.

On Afghanistan, defence minister O'Connor once again lumped the NDP in with the Taliban in a crass move to equate them with the insurgents who are killing our Canadian soldiers when he stated that those two groups are the only ones who want Canadian troops out of Afghanistan, That, of course, is no different than the rhetoric being thrown about so nastily in the US by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld who call their opponents 'appeasers' and who claim that the Democrats want the terrorists to win. It's low and cheap, but it's also to be expected from a defence minister who has admitted that the Afghanistan war won't be won militarily while he just sent another 250 troops and some tanks (that he said previously would not be needed) to the country.

Meanwhile, Foreign Affairs minister Peter McKay said on Sunday that Canadian troops will stay in Afghanistan 'as long as it takes' despite the fact that the spring vote only mandated an extended mission of 2 more years. At the same time, a new report by Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has found that our soldiers are three times more likely to be killed in Afghanistan than other countries' troops. (You can read the report here - pdf file.) Iin the midst of growing public disillusionment with the mission and a new push by the opposition parties to have a real debate about its future, this is definitely a losing issue for the Cons, no matter how hard they try to maliciously malign detractors.

Parliamentary wanker of the day: President of the Treasury Board John Baird, who thinks if he acts like a bully and just yells his way through question period, he's actually being an effective politician. I'm surprised his head didn't explode.