Progress and resistance

As expected, the Eminent Persons’ Report
presented at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting calls for the repeal of anti-gay laws across all Commonwealth countries. While they all agreed to modernize the rules of succession, there
appears to be resistance on some of the recommendations of creating a
Commonwealth human rights commissioner, and around the adoption of a
Commonwealth charter that would deal with human rights.

Here’s the background on that Liberal

question during QP yesterday about the presence of a lobbyist in the auditor general selection process. Speaking of that selection process, Liberal leader
in the Senate James Cowan has penned one of his open letters asking that the clerk of the Privy Council be brought to the bar of the Senate to answer
questions on why a unilingual candidate could have been chosen despite clear
job requirements that the candidate be bilingual. I’m not sure that Senator
LeBreton will agree to such a course of action.

Uh oh – the privacy commissioner doesn’t
think too highly about the government’s plans to introduce lawful-access legislation.

The Conservatives on the access-to-information, privacy and ethics committee have decided to try to compel the CBC
to release unredacted documents to the committee that the CBC has refused to
disclose to Quebecor’s ATI. They say they want to examine them behind
closed doors so the committee can determine the legitimacy of the CBC’s refusal
on the grounds of journalistic, creative and programming exemptions. (Kady O’Malley
unpacks it a bit more here). The Canadian Association of Journalists is
concerned that the Conservatives want the CBC to disclose information no other
media organization is forced to. It is also concerned that the CBC
has a record for nondisclosure. It’s a big mess, but considering that certain
members of the committee have an axe to grind with the CBC, I would hate to
think that all of those documents might end up being leaked to Quebecor (whose Sun Media chain has become

the official media arm of The Party).

No real surprise here, but the
Conservatives are disavowing the CBC story that they want to scrap our existing
(problematic) submarine fleet to get a fleet of nuclear submarines instead.

And Peggy Nash is now officially the first
(and possibly only) woman in the NDP leadership contest.