Is it time?

There have been a few occasion where myself and other bloggers have called for the toppling of the Conservative government, but few of these calls has been as forceful or coherent as Scott's pair of posts on the matter (aided by JimBobby) in the last couple of days.

I think they're onto something here, particularly with the prisoner transfer. A couple of ministries in Harper's government have always been embarrassments. The reality though is that Harper could get away with that at, say, Environment because no one who really cared about the environment was voting for him anyway.

Now though, we see confusion and gross incompetence in one of the files that Harper seems to be really concerned about, the war. Steve's ideas about Canada being "back" on the world stage (where did we go?), his desire to improve US relations, and his general yearning for a "tough" image were all bound up in the Afghan file.

And his people have messed it up, botched a cover-up, and generally made fools of themselves. How his communications people aren't unemployed is beyond me.

Harper has now exposed a great deal of weakness on what was thought to be one of his most well-guarded flanks.

Five Priorities? More like one.

Scott Tribe has already made a pair of very thoughtful posts on the cessation of prisoner transfers to Afghan authorities. I think that his central assessment of this is correct, that Harper was making a political move more than anything. This is another piece of evidence that Harper has one priority - partisan gain.

How damaging were the stories of Canada turning over Afghans to be tortured? The culture of Afghanistan appears to have, among other elements, a sense of family and clan honour that appears to require that scores be settled. If Afghans thought that Canada was handing over their countrymen to be tortured, how many of them were inspired to give aid and comfort to the Taliban? What if we had loudly said, as soon as the issue came up, that ill-treatment was unacceptable, that prisoners dying in captivity was unacceptable, and that we would not be party to any such thing?

The problem though is that Stephen Harper is a man of priorities - and priority number one is partisan victory.

Canadian Blog Awards

Everyone's talking about them (and by everyone, I mean everyone in the Canadian blogosphere). I looked through the nomination lists and saw that my favs were pretty much all nominated in one category or another. Awesome, I thought, I just have to show up to vote. It wasn't until today though that I realized that this blog has also been nominated in the Best Non-Partisan Blog category.

A big thank you to Scott Tribe for the nomination!

Remember readers, vote early, vote often.