Back to the Super-Secret Parliamentary Pro-Life Ca-Ca.
Harper’s denyin’ (who knows if he’s lyin’) that this government has any intention of revisiting “The Debate”, as Soldier for the Unborn (and MP) Rod Bruinooge so blithely announced on Sunday. Okay, whatever. The fact remains that this “pro-life caucus” does exist, has existed for years, and exists in a shroud of secrecy. That’s wrong. It would be one thing if they were just getting together to drink beer and play poker, but they’re not. They’re getting together to discuss ways of curtailing My Rights, therefore I want to know who they are.
As Buckets says, debate is good, but with whom? But PPLC members appear to have sworn some kind of anti-choice Omerta, and it’s unlikely that they’ll be revealing their identities anytime soon. Who knows — maybe this thing is so secret that they don’t even know who’s in it, they just use names like “Mr. Blue”, “Mr. Orange” and “Mr. Pink” when they have their clandestine “Pro-Life Caucus” meetings to discuss their next big heist of women’s rights. Obviously it’s up to us to ferret them out.
To that end, I’ve reproduced a list of *known* anti-choice MPs that was put together by the Arbotion Rights Coalition after the last election. The MPs are marked under 3 categories: (1) Previously designated anti-choice, (2) Expressed disapproval of Morgentaler’s Order of Canada, and (3) Voted “Yes” on Bill C-484. With the magick of Photoshop, I’ve highlighted those who’ve got 3 strikes against them. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to give your input as to which of these MPs you think might be PPLC members. Here goes:
There are also 2 Indies, Bill Casey and Andre Arthur, but neither of them made the 3-strike cut.
Obviously, cabinet ministers are unlikely to be part of this thing, and there could be some suspect MPs who didn’t make the ARCC’s list for whatever reason, but this seems like a fairly good starting point. Who knows? That’s for us to find out, eh?
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unrepentant old hippie 
Aaaaahhhhh those Liberals!
And with today’s Globe piece from Gloria Galloway it looks like, maybe the real statergy of the Harpoon is to make Iggy either own ’em or disown ’em….
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(vs. whistling while covering ’em with a rug)
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That’s been a long-time Conservative strategy “Hey look, there are a handful of Liberals who are as disgusting as almost every single one of us are.”
I can see why the NDP might want to call attention to Neanderthal Liberals, but I’ve never seen the potential pay-off in this for the Cons.
RB–
The potential pay-off?….Whack-a-doodle dandies look ‘reasonable’ AND the Harpoon looks reasonable while he moves the country to the right.
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Ross K – For once, I think all sides agree on this one — Iggy has to own them or disown them. IMO it’s time to clean house: if these guys want to be anti-abortion personally, that’s fine, but as Liberals I expect them to take the Paul Martin approach and not impose their personal beliefs on others.
Of course, this might well have been engineered to put Iggy in the Hot Seat. Thus Bruinooge’s repeated references to the PPLC as a “cross-party” caucus.
RB – I think the potential payoff for the cons is maybe compromising the LPC’s “progressive” cred, although I don’t see how such a small percentage of MPs really does that. The party as a whole is pro-choice. And anyway, it’s such a dead issue — abortion for most people isn’t even on their radar. But…
Ignatieff is already suspected by many to be a conservative with a red tie, so I guess every little thing that causes divisiveness between the centre and the farther left helps the CPC.
Ignatieff should have come out stronger on the issue in my view. Seriously, he could have stated clearly that it’s a non-issue as far as the LPC is concerned but that more pressing is the need to preserve pay equity, build affordable housing and institute universal childcare. If he is such a great leader, he could have come strong out of the gate and taken this as an opportunity to champion women’s issues.
Meanwhile, Bruinooge is not making himself more popular in Winnipeg:
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/canada/bid_to_reopen_abortion_issue_stirs_furor.html
Harper can deny all he wants but he’s not to be believed – EVER. He’s done nothing but lie the entire time he’s been in power about everything & anything.
The problem for Iggy is he has no real power over these people. Not only does he have no cabinet posts to deny them right now, they’re not cabinet material even if he did.
He has no power to enforce the whip on any theoretical abortion votes – and if you’ll recall from the marriage vote, when the whip was imposed on cabinet (as is ALWAYS the case on government legislation), Harper loves it when other parties impose the whip and calls it anti-democratic, notwithstanding that he imposes the whip like no previous PM.
Great article Beijing York. Isn’t it sad to read those comments though?
One person insists that if they had known old roddy was a wingnut, they wouldn’t have voted for him. Um….People are so unequipped. The information is out there. Is it the media’s fault? or and intellectually lazy electorate?
Beijing – I suppose Iggy couldn’t be too decisive about this because he doesn’t know which one of his guys is involved, not that it’s too hard to figure out. Anyway, that’s tough — it should be unacceptable for any LPC member to belong to a caucus that seeks to undermine women’s rights, which I *assume* are still part of the LPC platorm(?) He should have immediately said any Liberal belonging to the PPLC would be getting their ass kicked.
We already know Iggy is a fiscal conservative, so he should at least be solidly progressive on social issues.
Re the Winnipeg Free Press article — Ha! Hopefully the letters with that article are a proportionate representation of all the letters they got. One supportive letter out of 9? Ooops. And I noticed that at least one of the letters was from a CPC voter who said they wouln’t have voted for Bruinooge if they’d known he’d bring this up.
RB – For sure, what is the leverage? Right now there is none. There is in the future, though — someone like Dan McTeague (if he is in this caucus) might be cabinet material.
I’m still disappointed in Ig’s response to say the least. He’s a fiscal conservative (which is OK with me as long as he doesn’t go crazy with it) but on social issues, he should come out swinging. Most Canadians don’t want to revisit this issue, so this was a lost opportunity for a right-wing Lib to solidify his progressive cred, IMO.
pale – I thought the comments with that article in the WFP were interesting too, especially the one you point out. People really are pretty uneducated about the candidates — I would have thought it was common knowledge that Bruinooge was anti-choice. However, the abortion issue, like same-sex marriage, is so dead that it’s no longer on most peoples’ radar. The people that do all the screaming about it make up a tiny minority of the electorate.
penlan – “Harper can deny all he wants but he’s not to be believed – EVER.”
Agreed. While Harper might appear to be “pro-choice” in terms of not wanting to introduce abortion legislation, the truth is that he is “pro-staying in power”. He has had to work long and hard to overcome the image of being a fundamentalist chimp who’d ban abortion and send gays back to the closet, but I still don’t trust what he might do with a majority government. And apparently neither do most Canadians if he couldn’t win a majority even running against a Liberal party in such disarray as the Dion Libs.
I think Bruinooge of “massive poll” fame is trying to make a mountain out of a molehill again. The boy is prone to exaggeration and I suspect the reason for all the secrecy is he doesn’t have the numbers to back it up. There’s no compelling political advantage to being pro-life in this country, if there was, Steve would be all over it, so I doubt there’s more than a handful seriously involved in this thing. Bruinooge is just someone who has taken it on as a cause and he’s trying to turn it into more of an issue than it really is.
Nonetheless, they should be named, this secrecy stuff is childish, undemocratic bullshit, and it would go a long way toward showing Bruinooge for the power hungry asshole he is.
Bruce – “There’s no compelling political advantage to being pro-life in this country, if there was, Steve would be all over it, so I doubt there’s more than a handful seriously involved in this thing.”
Quite right, being “pro-life” is a political liability in Canada. We aren’t the US, where people are content to be governed from the center-right to far right. (For all the screaming about his being a “Marxist”, Obama is in about the same place as Ignatieff on the political compass — a right-wing centrist.) Canadians, however, won’t tolerate being governed from anywhere but the center.
Still, as you point out, it is undemocratic to have a “secret” cabal that calls itself a “parliamentary caucus”. If these guys want to get together in their free time and talk about how much they hate abortion, then fine, but if they’re doing it as a “caucus”, we need to know who they are.
I wondered about the legality of calling it a caucus, a quick web search seems to indicate the term is fairly informal, it isn’t even used in the UK, did not know that. So I’m inclined to think this more of a cabal, as you put it, that tries to take on an air of legitimacy by calling itself a caucus.
Bruce: “I think Bruinooge of “massive poll” fame is trying to make a mountain out of a molehill again. The boy is prone to exaggeration and I suspect the reason for all the secrecy is he doesn’t have the numbers to back it up.”
Are you suggesting he’s exaggerating the size of his caucus?
Large caucus, massive poll – it’s all about cock in that family!
RB, this is how clueless I can be sometimes, but I honestly wasn’t thinking about that when I wrote it, oh for shame.
I guess the bottom line is I’m accusing him of being a size queen. LOL
See, I’m always thinging about that. Well not *that* per se, but the sexual double-entrendre. I’ve long accepted that what I bring to the political discourse is primarily off-topic juvenile snark.
And that’s why we love you, RB! 😉
The Calgary Herald’s editorial writers are notorious pro-life cheerleaders, and Bruinooge’s outburst has given them another opportunity to spread the ignorant hysteria they promote about full term abortions. They believe doctors are doing these procedures in secret because there is no law against it. To believe this, you also have to believe that there has been a giant conspiracy of silence over the past 20 years, by hospitals, clinics, nurses, technicians, support staff,etc. not to mention family and friends of women who were very pregnant one day, and then not the next. Where’s the bodies? In their latest rant, they suggest that a law would provide “policing” that isn’t happening now! Think about that. Would all pregnancies and their eventual outcomes have to be registered? The stupidity of this suggestion is surpassed only by the writers’ willingness to put their delusions of ongoing baby-killing aside for political expediency (they are also Harpies). Read it to believe it.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/Right+cause+wrong+time/1126100/story.html
Calgal – Thanks for that, it goes in the “Things that make me go ARRRGGGGHHHH!!!!” file. I will post about it later.
“They believe doctors are doing these procedures in secret because there is no law against it.”
The cognitive dissonance of these people is mind-numbing: If there’s no law against it then why would doctors feel they had to do the procedures in secret? Answer: They don’t feel they have to do it in secret because they Just. Don’t. Do it. Period.
“In their latest rant, they suggest that a law would provide “policing” that isn’t happening now!”
The irony of this is that, if a law were to be crafted, who would the civil servant tasked with it go to for guidance? The DOCTORS. The ones who are currently policing themselves by setting their own procedural guidelines for abortion.
The only purpose served by having an “abortion law” is to seek amendments to make it ever more restrictive. And to seek further laws against contraception. That’s it.
Now I’m pissed.
Do they think that doctors are so eager to perform late-term abortions that they’re willing to sacrifice being paid? Doctors aren’t PAID for procedures they don’t tell anyone about.
RB – That makes too much sense, fundies wouldn’t get it. They’d rather believe it’s a huge pro-abort conspiracy of silence.
Every human being has the right to live. To take a life in violence is MURDER. Abortion is MURDER! I’ am waiting for my right to vote on this matter once and for all.
“Every human being has the right to live.”
But a fetus is not a human being, so removing a woman’s reproductive rights based on that argument is not going to fly. But if you want to hold your breath while waiting for your chance to vote on what is none of your business, be my (and I suspect JJ’s) guest.
Wow! This is an old thread! Sumbuddy diggin’ in your compost heap, JJ!
Unless they’re abortion providers, right Hutch?
ESFOAD, you bastard.
Hutch – You’re waiting for your “right” to vote on MY RIGHTS? 😆 Don’t hold your breath.
On second thought, go ahead — hold your breath.
OK. I’m done gazing at ESFOAD and hoping for a lightning strike. What do it mean?
ESFOAD = Eat Sh*t, F*ck Off And Die
Ah. Thank you.