On deflection

It's been clear for some time that the Gordon O'Connor detainee fiasco would offer one of the strongest tests of the Cons' willingness (or lack thereof) to admit mistakes and create internal lines of responsibility. And not surprisingly, the Cons have responded exactly as would be expected from a party which thinks that accountability is something that only happens to Liberals...with the latest news being that they're trying to deflect blame from O'Connor by saying others should have started doing his job sooner:

Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor feels he has been left to twist in the wind by his cabinet colleagues, senior federal sources said yesterday as finger-pointing burst into the open over the government's handling of the Afghan detainee crisis.

A senior defence official, seeking to present Mr. O'Connor's views as he fights for his political life, said the Defence Minister feels he has been shouldering the blame for Canada's policies toward Afghan detainees for more than a year.

It was only after Mr. O'Connor ran into trouble in the House of Commons this week amid new reports of prisoner torture, that other cabinet ministers were brought in to defend the government.

“He didn't have any support for a year,” the official said. “This week, [other ministers] started to stand up because the Prime Minister gave the green light. He had been alone for a year. ...The minister is a team player. If his job is to take flak for everybody, he will take it.”

The problem, of course, is that the problem has come up on a file while is supposed to be within O'Connor's ministerial responsibility. Which would make for a very good reason why O'Connor should indeed be charged with answering questions as to how the matter was handled, rather than diverting that task to whichever of the Cons' other ministers or parliamentary secretaries draws the short straw on a given day.

In fact, all the Cons' new strategy does is to try to pretend that a minister's missteps can be ignored if somebody else is left to answer for them. And sorely as O'Connor deserves to be fired for bungling his job, it's an more damning sign of a government which has no interest in individual accountability to simply remove responsible parties from the spotlight in the hope that others can better obfuscate over what was done wrong.