Ottawa

Less than a week to go

I am reasonably informed that all sides will be back at the table tomorrow morning to discuss the release of detainee documents. Meanwhile, Peter Jones, a former member of the Privy Council Office, fusses over the issues of trust and security and partisanship.

The key is that the Opposition MPs on this committee would have to agree to park at the door their impulse to use secret information to score real-time political points over the policies of the government of the day. Their role would be limited to providing the nation with the assurance that these policies were implemented properly, which would require some mechanism that would kick in if the committee felt the policies were not being implemented properly (but what to do in a situation where the government members felt they were, but the opposition members felt they weren’t?). The larger political debate over whether those policies were the right ones would go on in Parliament, as it does now, and the parliamentarians who had access to secrets would likely have to hold their tongues from time to time.

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