Stephen Harper calls Brian Mulroney a Liberal
According to Stephen Harper, his mentor, former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, was the leader of a Liberal government. Mulroney's Liberal government created the Co-ordination of Access to Information Requests System in 1989, and therefore our current, first-ever Conservative government had to kill it for the good of government transparency. Transparency in government is, evidently, only useful through two offset polarised lenses.
Here it is: CAIRS has to be killed because it is a Mulroney-Liberal program. From yesterday's Hansard, relevant bits underlined:
Hon. Stéphane Dion (Leader of the Opposition, Lib.):
Mr. Speaker, on the eve of World Press Freedom Day, the government took another step to limit transparency and accountability. It quietly killed the CAIRS, which allowed everyone to know what information Canadians had requested about their government through access to information.
Why did the government shut down the registry? What does it have to hide?
Right Hon. Stephen Harper (Prime Minister, CPC):
In fact, Mr. Speaker, this is a government that has actually widened access to information. The database in question was created by the previous Liberal government. It was called the product of a political system in which centralized control was an obsession. That is why the government got rid of it.
Posted at 09:58 on May 06, 2008