Orders of the Day (12/23/2009)

The jist? An almost perfect three-way split between those who believe that the Conservative government "passed Afghan detainees to Afghan security forces knowing they might be tortured," those who think that the Conservatives "would never knowingly pass detainees to Afghan security forces if they thought they might be tortured," and those who just don't know.

When asked to assign credibility amongst various parties, the military -- specifically, the Canadian Armed Forces -- scores the highest, with the opposition Liberals and New Democrats in second and third place respectively. The government comes in a close fourth, and the Bloc Quebecois is in last place, although given the fact that Quebec respondents seem distinctly more likely to think that the government would knowingly transfer Afghan prisoners despite the risk of torture, the relatively low score for the Bloc Quebecois, as compared to the other two opposition parties, may be simply because the poll looked at the complete response, and not just Quebec when calculating the BQ's credibility. (Also, it seems odd that the list was limited to the CAF and the various political parties; to give a more complete picture, I would've added several other sources to the list, including the media, human rights groups such as Amnesty International and - of course - Richard Colvin, but I don't get to write the questions.) 

Also: Remember the PMO-or-CRG Camera Guy who showed up to film yesterday's "informal session" of the Afghanistan committee? We still don't know who he was, but the Sun's Althia Raj did manage to capture his hasty departure after his presence was noted by the chair.

Finally, the Globe has the latest PMO talking points on those end-of-year interviews, in which the anonymous drafter shows remarkable chutzpah in nitpicking the coverage of the PM's carbon tax-related comments to CTV News, which it claims is "false and misleading," perhaps because it ignored  the attempt at instant damage control by the PM's director of communications, which happened off-camera, after the interview was over, during a conversation between the staffer and a CTV journalist. 

You know what? That's pretty much the risk that you're running when you only do one official interview in each official language, guys. 

Unlike the traditional year-ender interview circuit, if the PM says something that you worry could be misinterpreted, you don't have the opportunity to have him clarify the point during subsequent interviews. What Bob Fife says he was told by a communications staffer after the camera stopped rolling is not part of the official record, and a reporter forced to cover an interview conducted by another media outlet by watching it on television may well be entirely unaware of the post-interview intervention by PMO staff. 

That's it for today -- and for the rest of the week, at least as far as Orders of the Day. I'll be around for the rest of the day, and then I'm off until next Tuesday. Happy Yule to all!