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May 01, 2007
Please to be translating words of socialist leader and his minion?
Jack Layton on the Shane Doan "controversy (sic)", over which Hockey Canada and Sport Canada officials will now be called to testify before the Official Languages Committee - seriously:
Layton: Well, it's very unfortunate. There was clearly a controversy involved here and it's ended up casting a shadow. It's diminishing the enthusiasm with which everybody should be focused on the hockey. You know, Canadians want to encourage our team and this is unfortunately distracting from that. It was therefore, you know, the wisdom of the decision has to be questioned.
Q: Mr. Layton, (inaudible) is that the NHL looked into this and investigated it and cleared it. So why rehash this?
Layton: Well, I just think that there perhaps could have been a wiser choice so we could have avoided the controversy. I think it's unfortunate because it's taking away from the enthusiasm that everybody wants to have. I mean, we want to have a great representation. We've got fabulous hockey players there. We want them playing at their best, not having to think about something else and it's unfortunate that that wasn't on the minds of the decision makers at the time.
Acadie-Bathurst dipper Yvon Godin on same:
Godin: Sport Canada could have made, never made the decision to appoint him there. They could have waited and if he's not guilty, they could have brought him in, in two years from now or three years from now. But by doing this, it creates this controversy here in the country that we didn't need at all, we didn't need at all.
Q: You know he says from Russia that this happened in 2005 and he's always denied that he said these things, and he says the NHL took a look at it and cleared him. Shouldn't he, isn't the case closed?
Godin: Well I don't think that it's clear because it's still there. It would have been closed if we didn't hear about it. ... I mean, I used the example this morning at the Official Languages Committee, I just used that as an example. Here's a guy who works in a bank and four persons say that he stole the bank and the next day they put him as a manager of the bank. Does that make sense? No. Because they should wait for the court that takes place as far I am concerned.
I have pretty much no idea what Layton's saying. But Godin is on record that allegedly using an anti-francophone slur against someone who wasn't meant to hear it is as bad as allegedly robbing a bank, and that having been cleared of said charges to the NHL's, his teammates' and (apparenly) the aggrieved linesman's satisfaction, Doan should be forced to foresake his international career until the glacial civil proceedings between him and Denis Coderre decide once and for all whether he actually said it - which they almost certainly won't.
I can forgive, if not tolerate, the more obnoxious opposition gambits on Afghanistan. They don't have to do it like this, but their job is to oppose - and anyway, the government's reactions in the past 10 days have been far more obnoxious than anything coming from the Liberals.
But there is simply no earthly reason for a serious country's parliament to be debating Shane Doan. And no Canadian government has ever been more in the right in the history of Confederation than when Helena Guergis rose and said, simply, "Mr. Speaker, the senior men's hockey team selection is the responsibility of Hockey Canada. It is not a decision made by the Government of Canada." In other words: please, for heaven's sake, shut up.
Posted by Chris Selley at May 1, 2007 08:19 PM
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