Wednesday, May 28, 2008

For Your Eyes Only

Now everybody is asking why Bernier could have mislaid those secret papers for so many week without anybody noticing. It's simple. His long-suffering staff never actually gave this clown any secret papers -- they just stamped EYES ONLY on government press releases, knowing he wouldn't read them anyway.
Jason Cherniak sums up the real scandal about the Maxime Bernier affair -- that he wasn't fired long ago for all the screw-ups in his ministeral performance:
The Liberals demanded that Maxime Bernier be fired for a long list of reasons:
- suggesting to reporters that Kandahar Governor Asdullah Khalid be replaced. He was quickly forced to retract those comments and acknowledge that Afghanistan, as a sovereign country, must make its own decisions;
- his mishandling of the case of Brenda Martin, a Canadian left stranded in a in Mexican prison for two years;
- his failure to take a leadership role (or indeed any role) in the international effort to ban the production and use of cluster munitions;
- his abandonment of key foreign affairs files to other ministers - Afghan detainees (Peter MacKay), death row inmates abroad (Stockwell Day), the proposed sale of the Radarsat 2 satellite system (Jim Prentice), the Brenda Martin case (Helena Guergis), a summit of foreign affairs ministers of Arctic nations in Greenland (Gary Lunn); and,
- his failure to respond to any of the recent international crises in Pakistan, Kenya, Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe.
These were all good reasons. But, apparently, they were all well within the expectations of Prime Minister Stephen Harper from a minister of foreign affairs. Instead, Maxime Bernier was forced out because he left top-secret documents with his girlfriend who had connections to the Hell's Angels.
The Liberals saw this coming. They have been demanding that Mr. Harper look into the relationship between Mr. Bernier and his companion for some time now. They understood that while ministers are obviously allowed to have private lives, they also need to be smart in who they spend their time with.
But he wasn't smart about anything else. So it's not surprising.

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