Bob Rae    MP for Toronto Centre

Since its adoption by the United Nations General Assembly in 1966, the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights has become a cornerstone of international human rights law. It states in part:

“Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to SEEK, receive and impart information…” (Emphasis added)

No issue of public policy is more important than Afghanistan, for the simple reason that it is the one place in the world that Canada is at war. Canadian troops have been engaged in the dangerous and difficult task of securing one province, Kandahar for longer than any other campaign since World War One.

Canada's initial engagement in Afghanistan came after the Al Qaeda co-ordinated attack on 9/11. NATO took the position -rightly - that an attack on one was an attack on all.

Stephen Harper's decision to call some by-elections in Quebec and not others in B.C. and Ontario is without precedent. How ironic that the one time champion of parliamentary accountability and fixed election dates would use the unreformed law on by-elections as an opportunity to exercise his personal power in a whimsical and arbitrary way. He does it because he can and because he believes he can get away with it.

The excuse of the Ontario election is just that - an excuse. The federal by-elections could have been called, and held long before campaigning began in earnest in Ontario.

Monday morning went for a walk through Regent Park, the fifty year old public housing development. This on the Monday after four people were killed by gun violence, one of them an eleven year old boy caught in the middle of a gunfight at Jane and Sheppard. Michael Bryant says - once again - it's time for another government to get tough on guns and gun crime. Of course he's right, but my walk this morning brought home the second half of the mantra, "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". Housing has become the great orphan of social and economic policy in Canada.

For me the hardest part about the Conrad Black trial has been explaining why it happened in Chicago and not in Toronto. Woody Guthrie famously wrote "some rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen". In the US at least it has to be said that prosecutors take white collar crime seriously. It is hard to reach the same conclusion here. Cases supposedly "under investigation" take forever, and nothing happens; when charges are laid the convictions are few and the sentences are light.