Ah, well, if Stephane Dion is subject to bouts of thoughtless blithering, at least he isn’t turning Canada into a fartcatcher.
Reuters news service reports today that Canada’s foreign ministry has announced that it will remove the United States and Israel from a watch list of countries where prisoners are at risk of being tortured. The fact that both the United States and Israel are known torturers of prisoners is apparently not part of the criteria.
This list isn’t even public. It was intended to be part of a training course for Canadian diplomats. One assumed that our diplomats might need to know when Canadians being held prisoner might be tortured (particularly when they are only teenagers). Still, the Conservatives’ Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier apologized (!) to the torturing countries and has directed that the manual be “reviewed and rewritten.”
Amnesty International Canada, which says it has lots and lots of evidence that prisoners are abused in the US and Israel, is “disappointed.”
Yeah, well, so am I. I was never a big fan of Jean Chretien but he had no problem stating his position against the invasion of Iraq. “Who’s next?” he asked. Of course, the Americans went berserk when we criticized them but it was a proud moment for me and, I believe, many Canadians.
I cannot imagine that many Canadians are proud of their country today.
