Deepak Obhrai: "The Grewal issue is something the party is handling internally"
CTV's Question Period has a report that Harper is concentrating on Ontario this week, noting recent weakness in the polls. After discussing the Conservatives' chances in Ontario, the report moves onto BC, where support seems to be slipping.
While Harper focuses his attention on drawing up support in Ontario, critics wonder if he's risking potential votes in B. C., where voters have never been fully committed to the party. "B.C. is not a Conservative stronghold. It's a stronghold of people who get annoyed at the Liberals and then vote for the next best alternative," Mair warns.Obhrai's allusion to Grewal seems ominous. The reference to 'the Grewal issue' seems oddly impersonal, as does the statement that it will be 'handled internally'. What might this entail? There is little that they can do except expel him from the party. Or am I missing something?
David Beers, editor of the online news website The Tyee, believes that with Harper's absence, B.C. voters will focus their attention on another Conservative member. "Who's the public face of the federal Conservatives right now? A guy named Gurmant Grewal," Beers told CTV's Question Period. Beers believes Grewal tainted they party's reputation when he secretly taped conversations between himself, Liberal Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh, and Tim Murphy, chief of staff to Prime Minister Paul Martin. Grewal said he taped the conversations to show the Liberals were attempting to buy support, while Liberals countered that Grewal was offering to sell his vote.
Conservative MP Deepak Obhrai believes the Grewal incident will not affect the party's popularity in B.C. "The Grewal issue is something the party is handling internally," Obhrai told CTV's Question Period. "And I think that at the end of the day if we stick to our message and get it out there, our numbers in British Columbia are not something that we need to be concerned with."
posted by buckets at 8/02/2005 12:39:00 AM
1 Comments:
How do you handle internally something like this? I mean seriously, this man made false criminal allegations, and was at the minimum lying to Canadians May 18 05 when he claimed the Liberals offered him a Senate seat for his wife. Since he was in the meetings he knew this was false without the recordings. So he is already a proven liar about a very serious matter. For me the real questions surround the CPC leadership, especially Mr. Harper, and his role in this affair. I cannot believe that he has stood by Mr. Grewal throughout all this, especially once it became clear that there never was the evidence to support the allegation of Liberals selling Senate seats. Nor has the CPC ever explained how 35 minutes of material was missing from the May 31 05 release. If they think they can handle this internally with some sort of party discipline, they are dreaming.
When they made those false criminal charges of Senate seat selling and then presented "sexed up" evidence to substantiate it, they crossed the Rubicon into a whole new type of corruption and scandal. They only made it worse when they had to release the remainder of the recordings that they have to date, and that material shows that the Liberals were telling the truth regarding Senate seat selling, Grewal trying to buy such a position and being repeatedly told no, and generally showing the Liberals had a solid basis to accuse the CPC/Grewal of passing off edited recordings as complete and unaltered. That is not something internal party discipline can clean up. No, the leader has some accounting to do as well as Mr. Grewal by this point, and until that happens this will hang over their heads like a sword of Damocles.
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