Begin the infighting

Well,
that didn’t take long. Anonymous New Democrats are going to the media and slagging Nycole Turmel by saying that she lacks “fire” and will be overshadowed by
Bob Rae. But hey – they’re not going to be like the Liberals at all.
Oh, wait – they went to Bob Fife instead of Jane Taber, so I suppose that was
different from the Liberals. (Although, to be fair, it does appear that Taber is
on holidays.) The Conservatives have also recycled a story, which is four years old, about Thomas Mulcair negotiating with the Harper government to join it after he left Quebec politics.

Meanwhile,
here’s a great piece about the trial by fire that the new NDP MPs will face in Layton’s absence. It also reveals a few truths about some of those
Quebec MPs, such as how Charmaine Borg spent most of the campaign working for
Mulcair in Montreal and spent only a few hours in her riding, which the NDP communications people blatantly lied about to the press by saying things such as, “Oh,
she’s busy campaigning but doesn’t have a cellphone.” Nice to see that they finally own up to the truth.

Vic
Toews wants to weaken privacy laws so the government can name and post
pictures of more people it deems a “threat to public safety,” such as it did with those “suspected war criminals.” The government had to
get ministerial exemptions to post that information, which government lawyers
were not happy about. Toews kept up his wide-eyed ploy of saying, “I don’t understand how the Privacy Act would overrule the public
interest.” It’s the sign of a slippery slope, which, if left unchecked, could allow the government to demand further privacy breaches “in the public interest.” It’s not a good precedent to set.

The
family of one of those “suspected war criminals” is threatening to sue the government
for defamation, saying the supposed allegations won’t stand up in court. This is, of course, why the government is using an immigration process with a
lower burden of proof.

John
Geddes at Maclean’s looks into the
shadowy anonymous financing of the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat

Antisemitism and the one-sided report that came out at the end of a conference it held.

And the
government has “blacklisted” a Canadian artist, who dared to be critical about
the government’s environmental record, by ensuring that funding to show her work in Europe, including that from a private sponsor, has been withdrawn. What were
we saying about this government’s capacity to tolerate dissent?