National Security: Keep the clowns out

The Globe's inimitable Ibbitson is bang-on (full text not officially online):

Two converging events pose the same challenge: Does the House of Commons have the political maturity to behave responsibly in a time of peril?

The sad answer is no.

Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor's second report [recommendations here] on the Arar affair proposes the creation of one powerful new agency and the expansion of another with broad mandates and real powers to watch over the national security apparatus. It also proposes a co-ordinating committee to oversee these new overseers.

But the opposition, being the opposition, wants to go further. MPs yesterday demanded a parliamentary committee with powers to oversee the overseers overseeing the overseers...

To do its job, the committee would have to routinely examine classified documents and meet in camera. The MPs on the committee would have to possess absolute discretion and unimpeachable integrity, qualities that, unhappily, are hard to find on the Hill...

Watching the conduct of MPs in the House and on other parliamentary committees, watching the cheap partisan shots and deliberate distortions that are Parliament's daily fare, watching the abysmal immaturity that characterizes our House, compared with American and most European legislatures, the thought of giving a committee of Canadian MPs routine access to life-and-death secrets is frightening [emphasis added].

And one of those MPs would be a member of the Bloc Québécois — which, after all, exists for the sole purpose of wrecking the country...

To prove the point, lefty Susan Riley of the Ottawa Citizen agrees (full text subscriber only):

One thing no accountability act will do is instil integrity. Neither will the parliamentary oversight committee on national security that opposition parties are clamouring for -- an idea Day is considering. Again, this is superficially appealing: the dark doings of secret agents exposed to purifying light through rigorous political scrutiny. The reality is that committees of MPs turn any issue, no matter now serious, into an exercise in score-settling and jostling for partisan advantage. See the environment...

The performance of MPs (all parties), both in the House and in committees, is consistently a shuddering embarrassment that makes it hard to consider Canada a serious country. There is very little cream amongst the crap.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at December 13, 2006 12:29 PM