Wayne Marston's missed opportunity

If I'm reading the Parliamentary index correctly, NDP freshman MP Wayne Marston had only been allowed to ask one couplet of questions in this entire Parliamentary session, until his single question today to Jason Kenney.

According to Parliament's Blues -- the draft Hansard -- this was the zinger he'd been waiting two months to deliver:

Mr. Wayne Marston (Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, NDP): "Mr. Speaker, the Secretary of State (Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity) deserves an opportunity to respond to allegations made recently by Ezra Levant, who is head over heels for the Liberal motion that would gut the Canadian Human Rights Act. Mr. Levant says the Secretary of State supports his view that 'these commissions are violating human rights, not protecting them.'

"Knowing their shared history and personal relationship, I thought it best to clarify the Conservative position on this illogical Liberal motion. Can the Secretary of State clearly state today all Conservative MPs will vote against the motion and that he personally condemns the motion in the strongest possible terms?"

Come on. That's the best Marston, and the entire NDP Question Period staff, can come up with -- a question originally written for the Liberals, but rejected by them as too lame? Surely someone should have told poor Marston that he was just lobbing a softball to Kenney, that he would hit out of the park: 

Hon. Jason Kenney (Secretary of State (Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity), CPC): "Mr. Speaker, I am absolutely on the public record defending freedom of speech because this government and this party believe in our constitutionally entrenched and protected rights to freedom of expression, freedom of speech and freedom of the press and we will always defend those freedoms, those ancient freedoms."

Didn't NDP Research tell Marston that Kenney has been all over this issue, from his press scrum late last year, to his tough rebuke to one of the commission's abusers? Did the NDP staffers really think that Kenney would abandon his principled campaign because of the, uh, sheer power of Marston's charisma?

Listen. I know it's tough asking questions in QP. It's not called Answer Period, for a reason. But the key to a good question is not having some weird, inside-baseball, hard-to-understand allusion that nobody understands. The key is lobbing something so surprising that it catches the minister off guard; or so embarrassing that even if the minister ignores it, reporters genuinely want to follow up. Marston's question failed those tests -- and so it has become news only for Kenney's blazing answer.

If the NDP can recycle QP questions written for but rejected by the Liberals, perhaps they'd consider these questions written by an old Reformer. The Bloc is welcome to them, too. They meet the test of surprising and embarrassing news much more than Marston's clunker:

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Justice Minister. One of his staff, Dean Steacy of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, has admitted under oath that, as part of his job, he joined a neo-Nazi website called the "Stormfront", and posted racist remarks there. Can the Minister please explain why taxpayers' dollars are paying someone in his department to join neo-Nazi groups to spread bigotry?

Mr. Speaker, can the Minister tell us: was this a rogue act by a single hate-monger who infiltrated the human rights commission? Or did others at the commission approve of this race-baiting strategy, too? Did the minister himself know? Or did he turn a blind eye to state-sponsored bigotry in his own department?  

Mr. Speaker, it's not just Dean Steacy who spreads hate in the name of human rights, using taxpayers' money. Richard Warman does it, too. He used to work for the CHRC, but then he left to work with them, filing dozens of complaints at the CHRC about hateful words. But now it turns out that Warman himself writes many of those hateful words, including calling Senator Anne Cools a "n*gger" and a "c*nt", and then complaining about it. Will the Minister immediately intervene to stay all of Richard Warman's complaints, and launch an internal investigation to see whether the evidence he planted was done with the collusion of his old friends at the CHRC?

Mr. Speaker, given the confession of the Minister's employee, Dean Steacy, that the CHRC plants racist evidence that the CHRC then uses to investigate and convict others, and given the proof that the CHRC's most prolific complainant has planted racist, sexist remarks, will the Minister launch an independent review of all so-called "hate message" cases that the CHRC has ever conducted to see if they were all corrupted by planted evidence?

Maybe Jack Layton will allow Marston up in QP again some time this Spring. Until then, he'll have plenty of time to practise in the mirror.