The Shiny: Not The Important

Grrr.

A few weeks ago, a cabinet minister got booted out of cabinet and out of the Conservative Party. Lots of hoopla. Lots of hearings, mostly about her husband, did he have a contract to lobby for a green business, blah blah blah.

Meanwhile, no discussion about the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan and what the Canadian government knew when. No talk about what we expect our soldiers to do and how we expect them to survive psychologically.

Why the attention on the "scandal"? Because everyone--opposition parties, media, the public--responds to the shiny. As in, "I'm paying attention to something important, I'm about to take action and Ooooh! Something shiny over there! I'm going over there." A person who is tap-dancing is pointing to something shiny. Over there.

A kerfluffle. Gossip. It's a slippery slope from letters on parliamentary letterhead, official BlackBerrys, text messages from the Hill, is-it-lobbying-or-is-it-a-social-call to the wide-eyed "news" tidbits read by Mary Hart on Entertainment Tonight.

Then whoa! The question of Afghan detainees comes back into the spotlight. PM Harper has been stalling Parliament's previous brief attention on the topic--its demands to know what the government knew about detainees and torture, and when it knew it--by dumping banker boxes full of papers with all the words redacted.

Parliament went to Daddy--er, complained to the Speaker. He deliberated and then made a 45-minute-speech last week that is the equivalent of saying "You kids have two weeks to work it out or else." Or else what?

But, I thought, at least we're getting somewhere. Once they get the administrivia figured out (for which there are precedents that do work, south of the border, y'all), we'll talk about detainees, about Canadian policies in Afghanistan, about how exactly Canada will get out of Afghanistan in 2011....You know, the important stuff.

Alas, it has become apparent that the Speaker's affirmation that Canadian politicians are expected to behave like adults--that is, to find a solution to this "problem" that allows elected representatives of Canadians to see material while still protecting the "safety of our troops"--is not about either the detainees or the troops. It's not even about sensitive information.

It's again about the shiny, the power. Does Parliament have the power to force the Prime Minister to cough up information that the public has a right to know? Or does the Prime Minister have the power to hide indefinitely behind "security," because he knows that nobody, but nobody, will stand up to him if it means an election?

Power: Does the Prime Minister have too much power? Are Parliamentarians irrelevant?

Important: Are young people killing other young people, and children, and old people, in horrific ways, for questionable gain?

Power. The ultimate shiny object. Too bad important isn't so shiny.