Bad Role Models

The Harper government is embroiled in their first political crisis, and it revolves around Canadian war dead in Afghanistan. First, the government decided that they would no longer lower the flag over the Peace Tower to half-mast to mark the death of Canadian soldiers. Then they banned the media from attending the return of the remains of the four soldiers killed recently in Afghanistan as the first case in a new policy of keeping the media away from these events.

I think that I basically agree with Adam Radwanski, supporting the flag decision while opposing the media one. I understand why people are up in arms that the government has stopped lowering the flag for these soldiers, but I think on balance it was a bad idea to start lowering it in the first place. We honour Canada's war dead on Remembrance Day and in the run-up to it, which I would argue is a far more powerful symbol of mourning and remembrance than lowering a flag on Parliament Hill.

What worries me about the other decision is not the decision itself: according to the CBC, a lot of soldiers wouldn't want the media there if it was them. I still think the time for privacy is whatever memorial service a family chooses to hold, rather than the military's return of these soldiers to Canada, but I understand the impulse.

What worries me is that this is, for better or for worse, something that the Bush administration has also been doing with regard to casualties in Iraq, and fits nicely into the ongoing narrative of the secrecy of the Harper government. They won't allow ministers to talk to the media about anything other than the Topic of the Day, they have a more suspicious view of the media than any government in recent history, and now they appear to be taking steps that will, whatever the merits of them, hide the cost of our war in Afghanistan.

It worries me. It worries me because I don't get why they're so big on secrecy. It worries me because I think the root of the Bush administration's evil, or at least the reason they've been as horrendous as they've been, is their fanatical insistence on keeping things in the dark. Generally speaking, there's no good reason for a government to insist on governing without letting people know what they're doing-that the Harper government appears to have taken a page from the Cheney crowd is disturbing.