One of the Best Things About Canadian Press is its Main Customer:

The Sun dailies often reprint news from the CP feed verbatim and thus the CP feed tends to be somewhat right wing. So, as a result, you only catch the particularly stupid policies of this neo-liberal 'Conservative' government. Like this particularly interesting story about the Government's decision to bar journalistic coverage of flag draped coffins returning home containing those Canadians who have, without regard to their personal feelings about the efficacy of this war, laid down thier lives for Canada. For Canadian freedom.

There are some times when I do sincerely wonder if the Right Honourable Stephen Harper believes, as he claims, that Canadians are willing to make sacrifices in the name of freedom and ,if he does, whether or not he has considered the implications of such a commendable attribute and how best to honour it. Why else would he allow his minister, the Honourable Gordon O'Connor, to present such a policy? Surely the bereaved families would not be displeased at the receipt of a nation's gratitude.

The father of Sgt. Marc Leger who died in Afganistan had this to say about what the Rt. Hon. Prime Minister described as what was supposedly a deriliction of what is in the interest of the bereaved:

"It was a Canadian thing. It was something we wanted to show all Canadians - what the cost of their liberty is... It's still heartwarming to (remember) the people's faces. People were lined up on the 401, in 2002, all the way from Trenton to Toronto... They wanted to be there. They had to be there. I was told that often. . . and those are the things I carry with me all my life."

The best reasoning that I have heard from the responsible minister on official mourning, on a slodier by soldier basis, is that the Canadian tradition is to remember war dead as a group on November 11th. As John George Diefenbaker cited Wordsworth: "He is the true Conservative who knows when to lop the mouldering branch."

Our war dead protocol was adopted at a time of massive casualties. When Canadian soldiers enter a combat zone they no longer die too quickly to count. Nor does our enemy. If we are to believe the experts who brought us modern warfare, war is surgical. It now involves more and more materiel costs and less and less human costs.

Our government should recognise this societal shift and move to meet it, lest the logical conclusion of such an impulse be the fencing off of our war monuments. Our Prime Minister, if he is serious about the non-politicisation of grief over war dead could kindly ask my mayor, Stephen Mandel, to move the World War II memorial, which overlooks Churchill Square to a more... private location, so as not to continually violate what, more than sixty years later, is still a very private grieivng process.

Carolyn Parrish said that Canadians would begin to turn against the war when they saw Canadians returning in flag draped caskets. Is Stephen Harper really taking Carolyn Parrish's advice? We'll have to see just how heavy this balloon is.