Dion's Faustian Deals

Yesterday, everyone's favourite Liberal clown Jason Cherniak opined that Liberals "picked Dion because we believed that he would make the best prime minister of the group." Well, as I pointed out, Liberals picked Dion because 17.8% of them thought he would make the best prime minister of the group, and another 36.9% wanted to stop either Rae or Ignatieff from becoming leader.

But now, the truth comes out. In fact, the Liberal Party picked Dion (by only 9%...) because of a handful of disgraceful, pathetic backroom deals with ethnic Sikh, Tamil, and Muslim voting blocs at the convention to destroy Canada's anti-terror legislation:

Among veteran Liberal insiders, it is believed that the several hundred Sikh convention delegates Bains and his allies led into the Dion camp (via Gerard Kennedy) came with a price: an end to the investigative powers contained in the Anti-Terrorism Act, which was opposed for predictable reasons by various Sikh, Tamil and Muslim organizations.

Indeed, I am informed by a well-informed source that the critical deals were cut months in advance, and were driven by Bains -- and, in the case of Muslim delegates, by Arab-Canadian MP Omar Alghabra -- through Kennedy, who'd been staked out early by ethno-politicians as an empty vessel into which they could pour their parochial agendas.

These machinations should not be confined to history's footnotes: The Montreal Liberal convention was a close-fought thing, and the mass migration of hundreds of well-herded delegates along ethnic lines was likely the deciding factor. If more information comes out about unsavoury deals, Dion's image as a squeaky-clean enviro-wonk will erode, and traditional voter suspicion about sleazy Liberal ethno-politics will bubble to the surface. Given the high stakes -- we are, after all, talking about a law that could help us learn the truth about the greatest terrorist attack in Canadian history, as well as prevent even greater carnage in the future-- the issue could prove explosive.

One of the Ontario Liberal delegates that Omar Alghabra brought to Dion was Mohammed Elmasry, who has openly advocated terrorism and violence against Israelis. Alghabra refuses to condemn suicide bombings, helped incite the Concordia riots against Jews, and belongs to groups that are under investigation for terrorism. Both have campaigned against Canada's anti-terror laws for years.

As we all know now, Navdeep Bains has a personal motive to gut our anti-terror laws: his father in law, Darshan Singh Saini, a spokesman and supporter of the terrorist Babbar Khalsa Panthak, is on the RCMP's list of witnesses at investigative hearings for the criminal probe into the Air India terrorist case -- the largest terrorist act in Canada's history.

Meanwhile, the Tamils opted for Dion over Rae and Ignatieff because the latter openly refused to reverse Stephen Harper's principled decision to put the Tamil Tigers on Canada's list of officially banned terrorist groups. And apparently, Dion made no such commitment. Or perhaps, he made a different one: Vote for Citoyen Dion, and Voila! The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is a terrorist group no more!

Cherniak has a new question today:

I have a question for all those people, like Robin Sears, who believe that the Liberals are falling into a "trap" by endorsing the Liberal sunset clause. What is the trap? The trap of Harper isolating himself and accusing the Liberals of being "soft on terrorism"? I'm sorry, but I doubt that Canadians would fall for such a Bushism.

Mr. Cherniak, Dion is the leader of the Liberal Party because he caved into the demands of groups sympathetic to terrorists, to gut our anti-terrorism laws.

"Soft on terror"? Be happy that's all Dion is being accused of... so far.