The Pat Martin Affair: Straight Talk, Lost Gonch

So Pat Martin arrives in the HOC today looking disgruntled, uncomfortable.  In the middle of this morning's session, during a vote on a motion to salute Canada's Crappie fishermen, he sneaks out, comes back a little bit later...at ease and smiling!  Turns out his underwear was too tight, but they're better now!  So what happened during the missing minutes?  Nobody from the Media Party has bothered to inquire!  Did Pat Martin discard his gonch?  Does his junk-catcher haunt the halls of Parliament?  Was he walking around all afternoon commando style?

And on issues like this is where we start to miss the Sun News Network.  If they'd been around, Brian Lilley would have led in a whole team (wearing Hazmat suits!) to search for the missing, like he did when CBC lost a chair in '011. And, shit, if it had been rumored that the underwear had fled to Budapest to join ISIS, SNN would have sent David Akin over to spy out the place for a couple of weeks, staying at fine hotels, eating street food in the markets.  Because SNN did news, man, don't say otherwise.  And when they did news they did it hard.

I'm really starting to miss those guys.

Meet Claude Haridge

One of the guys arrested in the Ottawa RBC fire bombing, 50 year old Claude Haridge of Sittsville, Ontario, has a fairly extensive Internet presence. Here's how they arrested him:

Crazy day today at work. This guy Claude Haridge works for the company I work for. When he got to work today a full tactical squad with automatic rifles and shotguns arrested him in the parking lot, I guess they had followed him from his house.

As it turns out, Haridge is an Electro-Mechanical Engineer for Terrapoint Canada Inc .

Here's him demanding justice for Mohamed Harkat.

And here he is singing the praises of an "activism course", entitled Science and Society, that he took at the University of Ottawa, and which has been mentioned in several MSM articles on the topic.

And here's a long .pdf relating to said activism course--a defense of it and Denis Rancourt, its teacher--which ran into trouble over various issues (see below), and which the university at one point looked set to discontinue (and may indeed have discontinued). Note several emails from Haridge, and also a letter of support from Sabrina Bowman, Office of Pat Martin, M.P. (Winnipeg Centre) on page 28. A short excerpt:

If you, as university administrators, are interested in helping shape students into critical and independent thinkers, leaders in their local and global communities that push creative and
innovative solutions to global problems, you will not only allow this course to continue, you will give it the resources it requires and work with Professor Rancourt rather than against him. However, if you would like to mould students into a single prototype that does not ask too many questions or "cause too much trouble," by all means, continue fighting against the course.

Note also on page 32 and forward, the accusations of anti-semitism against the professor running the course, Denis Rancourt, which resulted in the professor's filing a notice of grievance, and which may have been behind the move to discontinue.

The course is being taught as "a course where you bring in a person to basically bash George Bush [and] the Jews in Isra‘l; it's not what the course was meant to be,"[ said Alain St-Amant, head of the chemistry department]. According to St-Amant, the course has included "anti-Semitic crap."

Of course, innocent until proven guilty, and all that. But definitely more unneeded trouble for University of Ottawa.

PS. haven't really had time to grind through the .pdf. If anyone finds anything interesting in it that I've missed, please note in the comments.

Update: Here's another of the suspects, Matthew Morgan-Brown, defending the "activism" course. Thanks Otis in comments.

Rod Bruinooge Is Collateral Damage

Tory MP Peter Goldring's bizarre rant re the guilt or innocence of Metis leader Louis Riel has kicked up a fair storm of letter writing to and editorializing in Western province media outlets.

Furthermore, the resultant controversy also appears to have dinged Winnipeg MP Rod Bruinooge, who is himself Metis. On February 21, Bruinooge stated to reporters at the Winnipeg Free Press that, though he disagreed with Goldring's tirade, he also disagreed with the private member's bill which inspired it (This bill was introduced in November by Winnipeg NDP MP Pat Martin; it would exonerate Riel and erect a monument to him on Parliament Hill). Bruinooge said:

...if Métis leaders don't agree on how to deal with Riel's conviction, Martin should stay out of it.

"I don't think a non-Métis politician has any business getting into this," said Bruinooge.

Whoopsie! apology time!

"Right after I told you that Pat Martin as a non-Métis politician had no business in this debate I thought to myself how I really didn`t hold that philosophy and how it wasn`t a fair thing to say," Bruinooge wrote [the Winnipeg Free Press' Mia Rabson] in an email Sunday afternoon.

As for Mr. Martin, he is happy with the apology but thinks it was coerced:

"I never question the motives of an apology but I have no doubt the PMO ripped his head off for this," said Martin. `They do not want to be on the wrong side of this. Quebec was scorched earth for the Conservatives from the day they lynched Riel until the Diefenbaker years."

I like how he prefaces his questioning of the motives of the apology by claiming he's not questioning the motives of the apology. These NDP politicians aren't so hopelessly goody two-shoed after all.