Peter MacKay on Afghanistan: "Quack, quack, quack"

Rumours that the defence minister will leave his post for a job at a Bay Street law firm have turned Peter MacKay into a lame duck minister.

Sun Media’s L. Ian MacDonald argues that now is “the worst possible time for MacKay to leave,” noting that at a recent benefit at which he should have been drawing attention to Canada’s vets, the minister was “put in the awkward position of having to deny he was about to follow Jim Prentice out of cabinet.” A less awkward position for MacKay: attending the gala on the arm of former Miss Canada Nazanin Afshin-Jam. In any case, MacDonald says that not only is the government currently hammering out plans for a post-2011 training mission ‘inside the wire’ in Afghanistan, but is facing intense pressure from the U.S. to accept a riskier role ‘outside the wire.’ Given the U.S. abandonment of Canada during our bid for a seat on the UN Security Council, MacDonald says it’s essential we have a strong defence minister to tell Washington we won’t expose our soldiers to further risk for the sake of a fickle ally.

Inopportune though it may be, all signs point to the fact that MacKay is on his way out, according to the Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert. In a week where the defence portfolio has been front and centre, Mackay “spent more time denying that he would soon (leave) politics than manning the frontline in the debate over the follow-up to the Canadian combat mission in Afghanistan. By all accounts, MacKay was not so much missing in action as kept out of it.” Instead Stephen Harper’s communication director Dimitri Soudas has been taking the reigns. Hébert says this is indication that power-hungry Harper has elevated the prime minister’s dominance to new heights, writing “the PMO has been in ascendancy at the expense of the federal cabinet for a number of decades but that evolution has rarely been as blatantly obvious as over the past two weeks.”

The Globe and Mail reports that while the Liberals don’t object to extending the Afghan mission, they are alarmed at the ease with which Conservative ministers leave government for the private sector, raising the possibility of conflicts of interest.