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No need for Sajjan to resign

Soldiers telling great tales of battles fought, heroic exploits growing larger with every telling
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No need for Sajjan to resign

Soldiers telling great tales of battles fought, heroic exploits growing ever larger with every telling, celebrated in story, myth, song, and verse. These things are the stuff of all cultures from King Arthur to Norse myth, Horatius at the Bridge, The Song of Roland, The Charge of the Light Brigade. And we all know the Americans saved us and Private Ryan at Normandy in WWII and that Monty was “over-rated” (not American) because Steven Spielberg tells us so.

Soldiers’ tales are the stuff of national pride, in some ways too much so. We are human.

Lieutenant-Colonel (ret.) Harjit Sajjan, Canada’s Defence Minister, is a Canadian hero and a three-tour veteran of the war in Afghanistan we fought initially to show that another 911 will not be tolerated and later because a toady new prime minister who had sneered at Canada for staying out of the “Coalition of the Willing” origins of ISIS stayed too long in the Graveyard of Empires.

Minister, soldier, undercover police constable, intelligence officer, Harjit Sajjan was key to our operations in Afghanistan even if the word “architect” may go too far. “[H]is analysis was so compelling that it drove a number of large scale theatre-resourced efforts, including OPERATION MEDUSA,” wrote Brigadier General David Fraser at the time as Commander CTF Aegis.

A soldier told a great tale of battles fought, heroic exploits and of his part in them. They are justly legend, not entirely history. He, we, are human.

But there is another story. A political party that is not the Conservatives although it tells us so, is calling for the minister’s resignation because he misled us. They claim.

Integrity matters. The minister’s apology tells us so. But where is the apology from the former toady prime minister and all present members of his party in parliament who falsely claim to be Tory and who defame our hero?

They say it matters because the minister must be relied on to make important choices, decisions. True, if his choices and decisions will be shaped by any way in which he misled us, as they claim, and as they have made while misleading us.

Choices like fixed date elections which neuter the opposition and responsible government while claiming, falsely, that predecessor parties, the CA and Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, were agreed on their necessity. They were not, though falsely claimed by the toady prime minister.

Choices like senate reform to make senators and parliament accountable to the provinces, replacing Canadian federalism with American federalism, because they are not the Tory party of Confederation but the Alliance party still seeking to “change how this country is governed” to the drumbeat of continentalism. The toady prime minster misled us, pretended to be Tory, and did not resign.

Brian Marlatt

Honeymoon Bay