Blue Like You

Archive for November 19th, 2007

Wolfville, Nova Scotia has just become the first municipality in Canada to ban smoking if children under 18 are present in the vehicle.

CTV notes:

Earlier this year, the Ontario Medical Association said Ontario should ban smoking in vehicles carrying children, and said most residents in the province would support the move.

So this ban could likely gain momentum across the country.

What are the implications? This would seem to be an infringement on individual rights in favour of the greater good.

What about a pregnant woman? Should she be allowed to smoke in a car?

Smack-down time for columnist Don Martin today. The National Post’s ‘Letters’ page contains a response to his column “Letters to the MP don’t go missing“.

Finally we get some definitive information on the infamous Schreiber letter from non other than Marilyn MacPherson, who is Assistant Deputy Minister of Corporate Services for the Privy Council Office - PCO didn’t forward Schreiber’s letter:

I am writing to clarify several issues relating to Don Martin’s Thursday column. Firstly, the headline of the column is misleading — no letter went missing. All correspondence processed by the Privy Council Office is kept on file for the prescribed period of time. The statements attributed to a former supervisor in the correspondence unit of another government, to the effect that “all correspondence addressed to the Prime Minister is routinely forwarded to his office” is not accurate either. Due to the volume and nature of correspondence, in fact the vast majority of it is not forwarded to the correspondence unit in the Prime Minister’s Office, but is processed by the Privy Council Office correspondence unit.

As we have stated with other media representatives, the Privy Council Office processes all incoming correspondence to the prime minister. In the case of correspondence from Karlheinz Schreiber, it was decided that replying would be inappropriate as a result of the author being the subject of an extradition hearing, as well as his involvement in other litigation.

Finally, I want to reconfirm here for your readers the accuracy of statements made by the Prime Minister’s Office, that the Privy Council Office did not forward the March 29, 2007 letter to the Prime Minister’s correspondence unit.

So the letter was indeed received, but not forwarded to the PMO, due to concerns about the correspondence seeming to be inappropriate due to ongoing hearings and litigation.

Don Martin claims:

The Privy Council Office did not respond to requests for an interview to discuss this possibility, even though they were asked to call by the Prime Minister’s tight-lipped communications director.

Do you blame them, Don?

Just because you don’t get an interview doesn’t give you the right to therefore concoct your own story full of innuendos and spurious allegations.