Dan Leger is the latest pundit to pretend that any vote to enforce a simple document production order approved by a majority of elected MPs will give Stephen Harper a free pass to force an election. But he seems to miss an even more fundamental point in implying that the opposition parties should abandon all hope of effective oversight through Parliament in order to avoid any "benefit" to the Cons.
As I've noted before, the Cons' strategy on torture all along has been one of obfuscation and delay in an effort to avoid oversight. So any move to seek extensions or otherwise hold off on the release of the documents only gives the Cons exactly what they've wanted from the beginning. And if the opposition parties prioritize fear of an election above the exercise of their right to hold the government to account, the end result surely won't be anything but to further weaken their hand - both within Parliament in the near term, and when Harper decides it's convenient to plunge the country into another election.
So once again, the opposition parties should be seeking to enforce their document production order in full if (as expected) the Cons refuse to follow through on an agreed process to provide the ordered information to Parliament. And if the end result is indeed for the Cons to show their continued contempt for Canada's elected officials - which would involve deliberately ignoring both the production order and the terms of a contempt order which expressly avoids any implication of non-confidence - then an election may not be such a bad result.
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