(Forward: Joseph graduated from the University of Toronto with his Masters in Political Science in 2002, and is completing his Ph.D at the  London School of Economics in Political Science.  He was the former media director for the NO MMP campaign in the 2007 Ontario Referendum. He is currently the administrator of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Appreciation Society at Facebook.  He is also an avid blogreader. The opinions expressed by Joseph are not necessarily those of Scott’s DiaTribes).

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Jean-Pierre Blackburn’s recent statements about reopening the Constitution to  recognize Quebec as a nation certainly caught the eyes of seasoned and casual observers alike. Prime Minister Stephen Harper did little to dissuade this by not categorically dismissing the suggestion that Quebec should be constitutionally recognized as a nation. We should make no mistake. The Conservative government has once again adopted their traditional Constitutional stance from the days of Robert Stanfield and Brian Mulroney, which is to cave in to soft Quebec nationalists and sovereignists in the faint hopes that the sovereignist movement will disappear once their demands are met.

This proposal will not solve anything. Rene Levesque said years ago that Quebec will keep wanting “more and more” until full sovereignty is achieved. If we go back to the days of Meech Lake, Robert Bourassa said that the devolution of powers and the distinct society clause in the Accord were just a bare minimum and that Quebec would come back with even more demands.

The reasons to oppose this recognition of Quebec as a nation are well known.  In essence it boils down to one point. Recognizing Quebec as a nation means recognizing that Canada is really two countries, where Quebec governs itself and the rest of Canada can be left to remain English or anyway it sees fit.  This scenario would mean the death of one united Canada with two languages and a multiplicity of cultures  – and it will give us separation through the back door.

read more from "Guest blogpost: Conservative proposal to Quebec on constitutional reform will solve nothing."

I still don’t know what to make of this whole Mulroney/Schreiber business and whether it will hurt the Cons or not. However, for a government that supposedly has nothing to do with this affair, it sure is giving off the appearance of having something to hide, when the Justice Minister refuses to use his power to prevent or stay Schreiber’s extradition (or more comically, pretends he doesn’t have the power to do so when every legal opinion out there says he does), which causes this almost unprecedented legal move by the Speaker:

The Speaker of the House of Commons has issued a rare warrant compelling Karlheinz Schreiber to appear at a committee hearing Thursday to discuss his business dealings with former prime minister Brian Mulroney… The archaic legal process — last used in 1913 — could have been avoided if Nicholson had instructed officials to follow the original commons directive, issued last week. “It ought to be straight-forward,” Rob Walsh, the impartial Commons legal counsel told MPs on the ethics committee today. “It’s within the power of the justice minister. It’s his call. It’s his judgment.”

Nicholson however, is doing a “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” routine with Parliament over this.

As I said, when the government and the Justice Minister are going to such great lengths to avoid Schreiber being here to testify, you have to wonder what it is they don’t want people to hear. If the government has nothing to do with any of this affair, at the very least, Nicholson and the Cons have brought a lot of rather unnecessary attention and suspicion to themselves by their actions, or lack thereof.

I don’t mind if the Liberals and Dion ask that this independent arbitrator look into all possibilities of what went on with Mulroney and Schreiber, and to see what exactly went on in the Privy Council Office (I’m skeptical myself that in this regime, with its top-down control style of Harper’s, that officials in the PCO would withhold something as potentially damaging as these letters from him), but I think Liberals need to not yield to the temptation of trying to present this as the Conservatives equivalent to the Gomery Commission.

Let the inquiry do it’s investigations and make its report, and if something juicy or incriminating comes up, then do the pit-bull approach to it. Personally, I think the Afghan detainee issue and focusing on the Cons’ covering up what they knew what was going on and when, and the complicity involved in turning them over when the Con. government bloody well knew there was a good chance the detainees would be tortured is far more damaging to this government then the Mulroney/Schreiber sideshow.

UPDATE@6:24pm: Sebastien thinks the same way I do - and obviously Sebastien, you aren’t the only Liberal that thinks that way. I hope some of the leadership see it the same way.

It’s an observation of some out there who observe this in the media and the blogging world that you can tell how serious an allegation against a party or a government is by how vehement the proxies for that particular group deny the allegations, or by how much smearing and obfuscation they attempt to fling at the other side in an attempt to distract from the issue troubling their favourite political side.

If that is the case, then the initial reactions from the Blogging Tories and some online conservative commenter trolls to the Mulroney-Schreiber Airbus controversy and how it seems to have entangled Harper and the Cons are very telling, and several examples are noted in the links provided. Is this a big deal as it concerns the Harper government? I don’t know - too early to say. The proxies obviously think so.

Right now, the mere fact Mulroney’s name is some how connected to Harper, however tenuous that might or might not be, and the fact that Harper had 3 flip-flops in the past week on what type of inquiry to hold - from a cocky dismissal of it with a vague warning about investigating past Liberal regimes last week, to an independent person to see whether we need an inquiry, to now a full blown inquiry - gives the impression to the public something fishy has been going on.
It has led at least 2 pollsters to either conclude that it’s causing Con poll numbers to drop, or that it has potential to do so.

One thing for sure is that it is going to be a definite distraction for the Cons. That “clean government” proclamation they made about themselves may be coming back to haunt them, moreso then any other declaration or statement they have made that has been found wanting.