For some months now the treatment of Afghan detainees by Canadian forces has been a big issue in Canadian politics. Some people familiar with the situation have charged that the government -- both the current conservative government and the previous Liberal government -- has been ignoring until recently the fact that Afghan secret police were torturing and otherwise mistreating detainees turned over to them by the Canadians. Such turnovers to torture are illegal by international law. The current Harper government has done its level best to downplay the issue, to the point that it has refused to turn over to a parliamentary committee relevant documentation. The most that the committee has been able to get hold of has been heavily redacted copies censored by a judge.
For a variety of reasons this cover-up has infuriated members of the other parliamentary parties; one reason that's particularly relevant here is that the Prime Minister and his government (officially speaking the members of the ruling party) have a great deal of power, even in a minority position, and if they can keep Parliament blind about important issues under the claim of national security, you end up with a dictatorship, or something very close to it. Stephen Harper is a man who likes to keep all power in his hands. He makes all the decisions in his party and his government, and cabinet ministers and even more so his conservative backbenchers are ignored.
The executive function of government in the parliamentary system is supposed to be derived from Parliament as a whole, particularly the House of Commons; Harper has been ignoring the House, even when all the other three parties united for a change to demand access to the documents on the detainee situation.
The opposition parties eventually turned to the chief officer of the House of Commons, the Speaker of the House, a widely respected Liberal named Peter Milliken, and asked him to rule that the government had committed contempt of Parliament when it refused to turn over the documents. Today Peter Milliken made his ruling.
Milliken has been speaker for longer than anyone else, and he seems to know his constitutional history very well. He made a careful and clear speech in which he said that the privileges of Parliament, which have been established over the centuries, essentially required the government to remember that its powers came from Parliament. He ruled that the government could be seen to be in contempt. He then said that he hoped the government (basically the conservative caucus in the House of Commons, or even just Stephen Harper himself) and Parliament (basically the opposition parties, who hold a majority of the seats) should spend two weeks trying to come up with a sensible compromise, and if they didn't he would say something. What exactly he might say he didn't spell out.
A whole bunch of things could be said about this situation, but I think the relevant point is that Canada's involvement in Afghanistan, which was undertaken for a variety of unclear reasons for a variety of unclear purposes, has had a corrosive effect on Canadian democratic institutions. The resolution of this crisis may have lasting very important effects on the character of the country.
A brief background article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/...
A short summary from right after the ruling and live blogging of the speech:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/...