…On analysing the evidence before it and the precedents, the Chair cannot but conclude that the Government`s failure to comply with the Order of December 10, 2009 constitutes prima facie a question of privilege. […] I will allow House Leaders, Ministers and party critics time to suggest some way of resolving the impasse for it seems to me we would fail the institution if no resolution can be found. However, if, in two weeks’ time, the matter is still not resolved, the Chair will return to make a statement on the motion that will be allowed in the circumstances.

— Peter Milliken, Speaker, Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Thus begins two weeks of victory-declaring, midnight BlackBerrying, editorializing, and horse-trading. Canadian House of Commons Speaker Peter Milliken ruled in his speech to the house this afternoon a bunch of important things:

1. The December 10 motion requesting unredacted documents on the Afghan detainees was in-bounds;
2. Letters from Justice Department officials could produce a “chilling effect” on witnesses called to testify before parliamentary committees, however in this case it does not constitute “intimidation”;
3. The House has the right to request documents of the government, and that there are no exceptions to that, “even for national security.”
4. There are ways the documents could be shared with the House that would not compromise national security;
5. Ultimately, it is his opinion that the government is in contempt, and the House must vote on the matter.

Milliken, however, decided to give everyone two weeks to see if they can sort it out amongst themselves before putting it to that contempt vote. What’s going to happen? Nobody knows! Should be an interesting two weeks, though.

“While timeliness is the cornerstone of the Act, delays continue to be its Achilles’ heel,” said Legault. The findings of a special report tabled in Parliament this morning “show that little progress has been achieved so far to remedy the root causes of delay across the system.”

The bottom line is, important parts of Canadian government have become near-completely opaque, operating out of the oversight of citizens. They aren’t small departments or ministries, either: we’re talking big, important divisions of the bureaucracy, and their report card scores are much worse than “needs improvement.” The Globe story:

…core departments including the Privy Council Office and Foreign Affairs were singled out for slow response times and for creating a bottleneck that causes delays in other departments.

Five departments received F rankings and seven earned Ds, while the performance of Foreign Affairs was deemed so poor that its report card ranking simply states “red alert.”

There’s a little ray of sunshine here, the launch of OpenParliament.ca, which launched yesterday — good timing! — and allows you fast searching of Hansard records to easily follow what’s going on in the House of Commons. Different MPs’ statements are tagged by topic, party, and more. So it’s not all bad news. Just most of it.

Hillier is a former NATO forces commander and was Canadian Chief of Defense Staff until last year. In his recently released memoir, A Solider First, Hillier offers his take on the first headlines about detainee torture in 2007.

Canada had no official policy on detainees when our government first sent troops to Afghanistan in 2002, he writes, and the “minuscule number” of prisoners wasn’t a major concern in the early days. When the fighting heated up in spring of 2006, our military started handing their captures over to American Coalition troops, and then the NDS, Afghanistan’s intelligence service.

The main thing, Hillier contends, is these were the bad guys. “We were capturing these guys red-handed, in many cases in the middle of firefights or attacks on Canadians, and many were found with gunpowder or explosive residue on their bodies.”

Not so, says Richard Colvin.

As a Canadian diplomat, Colvin volunteered to go to Afghanistan in 2006, after the death of Glyn Berry. He stayed for 17 months.

While working for the Department of Foreign Affairs, and later in the Canadian Embassy, Colvin visited detainees. He told the parliamentary committee that he sent numerous reports to Canadian Forces and Foreign Affairs, airing his concerns about who was being captured, and the horrific abuse most, if not all, of the detainees faced contrary to the Geneva Convention. Many were innocent locals, farmers and truck drivers, Colvin said. His reports were mostly ignored, until he was asked to stop putting them in writing in 2007.

The government has attacked Colvin’s credibility and denied that the current government knew anything about torture. Peter MacKay called the opposition a bunch of “bobbleheads and muppets” during question period when Bob Rae asked about the government’s knowledge and action on the issue multiple times, in both official languages. MacKay’s continued response was to reference “the previous government” (and presumably his predecessor, Gordon O’Connor).

If Hillier stays true to his book, he’ll deflect the blame too. Any torture that might have occurred during the early transfers, he writes, was due to the “nascent” nature of the Afghan prison system. The system wasn’t perfect, and as for prison reviews: “it took an awfully long time to get them organized.”

During the ten pages in his book Hillier devotes to the issue of detainee abuse, most of it is centralized around what a good job he believes many Canadian Forces soldiers did not killing the prisoners themselves. “We had all learned something from Somalia,” he writes repeatedly. Yes, we did. The Canadian Forces saw its budgets hacked to bits, its numbers drop, and the country’s pride in its image of the “peacekeeping” soldier suffer a critical blow.

The Canadian Forces has changed dramatically since the death of a Somali teenager at the hands of two Canadian soldiers in 1993. An inquiry into that matter lasted four years, and never uncovered what the upper levels of government knew about the incident, or any attempt to cover it up.

Only time will tell whether Hillier’s testimony, and that of others called to speak before the committee, will be any more revealing.