Hidden from sight

The latest embarrassing round of Con spin seems to have started, as Harper's inner circle tries to explain why Wajid Khan's report on the Middle East will apparently be suppressed rather than going public as was originally promised.

The first obvious problem with the newly-announced suppression of the report is that it was never part of the discussion when Khan was first assigned the task. As noted in the article, Khan himself made perfectly clear that the report was to be available at least to politicians from all parties:

But Mr. Khan, the MP for Mississauga-Streetsville, insisted at that time that his work was not partisan, that his report would be made available to politicians of every stripe, and that he would brief former interim Liberal leader Bill Graham.

"I want to make sure that the Prime Minister gets it and all parliamentarians get it, because my work is not limited only for the Prime Minister. I'll be talking to Bill Graham. The critics will have information.

"The idea is to educate everybody with the best information that I can get and then they can go from there," Mr. Khan said in an interview last August with The Globe and Mail.

When asked specifically if his report would be made available to all political parties, Mr. Khan replied: "Oh yeah."

It's not entirely clear whether the Cons planned all along to suppress any report while telling Khan the opposite, or whether the position changed (perhaps as Khan took his walk across the floor?). But there's plainly no reason why a publicly-available report would have been valuable then but would be useless now.

Leaving that change of position aside, though, there's an even bigger story based on the Cons' response, as the wider view on information in general only confirms the worst suspicions about PMS:

(T)he Conservative government will not release the report, said Dimitri Soudas, a spokesman for Mr. Harper. He argued that Mr. Khan's advice would become less valuable if his report is made public.

"It defeats the purpose of Mr. Khan being an adviser to the Prime Minister. He would then be a pundit rather than an adviser, on such an important issue," Mr. Soudas wrote in an e-mail replying to The Globe's request for a copy of the report.

Apparently the Cons have no shame at all about claiming that information is worthless to them if it's publicly available. Which can only indicate that Harper sees himself as a Bush-like "decider", with neither Parliament nor the public at large playing any role in measuring his actions against the information on which they were based.

In effect, Soudas' statement has the ring of Kim Campbell's greatest gaffe writ even larger: "the public is no place to discuss serious issues". And unlike in the case of Campbell's statement, the context only aggravates the comment, as it's clearly expansive enough to apply to any "important issue" at any time with no advance warning. Meaning that Khan's reversal can only be seen as the tip of the iceberg when it comes to information that's being hidden from the public view.

Not that the Cons' attitude is particularly new given the haste with which they ensured that the Accountability Act would leave the executive untouched. But Soudas has now said publicly what the Cons were only willing to imply with their previous actions. And that position once again begs the question of why Canadians in general should put any trust in Harper when he has nothing but contempt for them.

Update: Paul Wells points out a few of the well-known documents which would qualify as mere "punditry" under the Cons' definition. Can it be long before the Wheel of Excuses gets another spin?