Before there was Bruce Carson, there was Maxime Bernier, who left government documents at his girlfriend’s house. To put this in context, I don’t think that these state documents should be treated with tremendous mystical secrecy – that isn’t the point. They are probably mostly banal. The point is that here’s another instance of the Harper people treating the government like it’s their personal property.
Before there was Bruce Carson, there was Maxime Bernier, who left government documents at his girlfriend’s house. To put this in context, I don’t think that these state documents should be treated with tremendous mystical secrecy – that isn’t the point. They are probably mostly banal. The point is that here’s another instance of the Harper people treating the government like it’s their personal property.
The more interesting story told in Lawrence Martin’s “Harperland”, that indeed I actually missed when it came out in the press and didn’t read about until the book, was about nuclear safety.
Pg 128: “One such storm swirled around the firing of Linda Keen, the head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Her watchdog agency had shut down the nuclear reactor at Chalk River, Ontario, over safety concerns, involving the connection of the emergency power system to the cooling pumps. The fifty-year-old reactor generated two-thirds of the radioisotopes used in life-saving medical procedures the world over. The PMO objected to her decision and reopened the facility… A month later, in January 2008, Lunn fired Keen, saying she had lost the confidence of the government.”
In a pretty remarkable display of partisan paranoia, Harper saw nuclear safety as a Liberal Party conspiracy: “Since when does the Liberal Party have a right, from the grave through one of its political appointees, to block the production of necessary medical products in the country?”
Harper also cheated at the leaders’ debates on the 2008 election (pg. 166). Elizabeth May saw it, and when her testimony was cited to Harper’s director of communications, Kory Teneycke, he replied “Yeah, well, you know what? She’s just lucky she was in the room. I don’t think she should have been there…”
Of course Teneycke doesn’t think she should have been there – she saw Harper cheating at the debates.
