Maxime Bernier has been erupting on Twitter lately. But he's not the only member of the Conservative caucus who has been stirring up controversy. Tim Harper writes:
To be sure, Shannon Stubbs, Blaine Calkins and Denise Batters have none of the power or cachet of Bernier, so they were more able to fly under the radar.
Last week, Stubbs criticized Justin Trudeau’s appointment of counterterrorism and constitutional law expert John Norris as a Federal Court judge because Norris defended Omar Khadr, who she called “a confessed murderer and terrorist.”
“This is an utter embarrassment for Canada and the Canadian judicial system,” the Alberta MP tweeted.
Never mind that Norris that was appointed last February and Stubbs was summoning outrage six months later; her comments also showed a complete disregard for the role of defence counsel in this country.
Batters, a Conservative senator, had to apologize to Liberal MP Omar Alghabra, parliamentary secretary to Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, after she tweeted that the birthplace of the Saudi-born Alghabra was influencing his judgment in defending his government in the Ottawa-Riyadh diplomatic spat.
Calkins went one better, sharing a screen grab of a discredited 13-year-old blog accusing Alghabra of celebrating his nomination victory in Mississauga as a win for Islamic power spreading to Canada.
Calkins also apologized, saying he had cited a “poor source” and “was unsure about what I was reading.”
For good measure, Michelle Rempel, the party’s immigration critic, used a day when newspapers across the world fought back against Donald Trump’s portrayal of media as “the enemy of the people” to launch an unsubstantiated attack on the media.
It's pretty clear why Stephen Harper kept his caucus on a short leash. All these eruptions should remind Canadians of the general nastiness of Harper's government:
A summer of social media dog whistles makes it too easy for the Liberals to tie the party back to its odious snitch-line, anti-niqab stance of the dying days of the Stephen Harper government.
Trudeau took the opportunity to do just that Thursday, declaring that this all means the Conservative party hasn’t changed since the Harper days.
If we are hearing the honest views of Conservatives who see Islamists and terrorist-backing judges in their midst, then Scheer has a deep problem on his hands.
Scheer does, indeed, have problems on his hands. Winning the leadership of the Party of the Furious was no gift.
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