Yes, Minister you're in trouble

By EDWARD GREENSPON
     

Thursday, January 31, 2002 — Print Edition, Page A1

The death last month of British actor Nigel Hawthorne (a.k.a. Sir Humphrey Appleby) comes at a particularly inopportune moment for Art Eggleton. Canada's Defence Minister, who has apparently modelled himself on the hapless Jim Hacker character from Yes, Minister, could use the wit and wisdom of Sir Humphrey.

Mr. Eggleton's failure to inform his Prime Minister that Canadian special forces had taken prisoners in Afghanistan -- leading to Jean Chrétien's misleading comments -- breaks a cardinal rule of government once enunciated by Sir Humphrey in a conversation with his second-in-command. The suggestion had been made that Sir Humphrey might not need to know about something that has transpired at the ministry of defence. He begs to differ, using the kind of logic that must have occurred to our Prime Minister on Tuesday.

Sir Humphrey: "I need to know everything! How else can I judge whether or not I need to know it?"

Bernard Woolley: "So that means you need to know things even when you don't need to know. You need to know them not because you need to know them, but because you need to know whether or not you need to know. And if you don't need to know you still need to know, so that you know there is no need to know."

That's right, Art. The Prime Minister needs to know even if he doesn't need to know. He obviously can't rely on your political judgment. Even yesterday, in regretting his failure to pass on the information, Mr. Eggleton said he was not aware the Prime Minister would be asked the question.
Perhaps his January business trip to Mexico City dulled his knowledge of the political debate in the country. How could Mr. Chrétien have not needed to know that we may have already captured prisoners in Afghanistan in the midst of a continuing debate about how Canadians should handle such captives?

Mr. Eggleton and Mr. Chrétien both spent the weekend in Ottawa, both attending the same meeting of the Liberal caucus. Why wouldn't the minister lean over at one point and say, "Hey, boss, we may have a problem"? Was he deterred by the tirade against Carolyn Bennett? ("Hmm, don't want to bug him now.") Or perhaps he sought to inform Mr. Chrétien's top advisers, only to discover they were off somewhere supervising the distribution of Liberal Party membership forms.

More probably, judging from his own words, it appears Mr. Eggleton simply missed the significance of developments, a conclusion not inconsistent with the quality of reasoning we have come to expect from the minister.

He's famous for blustering his way out of trouble, whether by inflating international comparisons of Canada's defence expenditures to bring us above our bottom-dwelling compatriot, Liechtenstein, defending Sea Kings through sly misinformation about their use by the U.S. military or spreading the incredible yarn that the Americans sought us out to join them in Kandahar rather than vice versa. The wonder is he hasn't been caught out until now.

His story on the prisoners has been customarily imprecise.

His first version of events was designed to create the impression that he cleverly discovered the involvement of Canadian troops through a photograph in The Globe and Mail. He put reporters on the defensive by noting it was there for everyone to see, so they should have known.

The hole in that narrative was that the incident occurred on Jan. 21, the photograph ran the next day, on Jan. 22, but Mr. Eggleton didn't make the discovery until Jan. 25 (and then chose not to inform the Prime Minister until he could nail down the details). If you believed Mr. Eggleton, you could only conclude that his officials had kept him in the dark until he ran across The Globe while rummaging through the blue box -- and then singularly noticed that the three soldiers in the picture were dressed in jungle camouflage in a desert setting, as only a Canadian soldier would.

Then yesterday, Mr. Eggleton confessed that he had actually been duly informed immediately after the incident. His comments of the day before were explained away by saying, "I did not initially understand the connection with the photograph" -- a perfectly acceptable defence, one supposes, considering the photo had not yet been published.

Whatever.

It's no wonder Mr. Eggleton underestimated the import of the capture because he has underappreciated the import of the PoW issue from the start. In the Commons as recently as Monday night, he stoutly maintained there's no problem handing over Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. "The bottom line is treating people fairly and humanely."

Wrong bottom line, Art.

The real bottom line is that countries like Canada -- and up until now the United States -- stand for the rule of law and due process. That's what distinguishes us. Donald Rumsfeld notwithstanding, we don't make it up as we go along.

Prisoners are not to be treated humanely through the good graces of Mr. Rumsfeld but because it's the law.

Due process can be a real pain. But the Geneva Conventions are hardly a straitjacket; they make sufficient allowances for al-Qaeda fighters.

All you have to do is submit the issue to a competent tribunal. It's no more up to Art Eggleton to dance around these provisions than it is for Mr. Rumsfeld to flout them.

Perhaps we need a deeper thinker than Mr. Eggleton to sort through this issue.

Then again, there's something almost Sir Humphrey-like in using the existence of a photo that hadn't been published yet to save your political neck.