Stephen Harper will be announcing a confidence vote on the Afghan mission this Thursday. The actual vote will be taking place sometime in March.
That means it’s all up to everyone’s favourite Liberal leader: Stephane Dion.
According to this article, he’s adamant about ending Canada’s Afghan mission in February 2009, and is definitely not open to extending it at all. This could leave him in an awkward position. It pretty much means that he has to vote against the motion, likely bringing down the government, and forcing an election which he is nowhere near sure of winning.
This is of course why Harper is calling a confidence vote in the first place.
I love politics, don’t you?
Exactly one week ago, the Biological Sciences building at UBC was in lockdown. No one was hurt, and the explanation received from the university and RCMP is that there was an “unspecified threat.”
By piecing together various quotes from the RCMP, we can speculate that there was at least a suspect, that the threat was specific to the building, and that the police thought that the suspect might have been in the building. Clearly something was wrong if they had SWAT teams sweeping the building and were giving people secret words and such.
Today we’ve had another unspecified threat, even less specific than the last - this time it didn’t mention a building. They still closed down the bioscience building, because of last week’s incident, but classes were still being held elsewhere and students were urged to be vigilant.
An email forwarded from UBC president Stephen Toope yesterday afternoon says,
What can we all do when faced with such a threat? We are taking the advice of the RCMP to treat the non-specific nature of the threat with a higher level of community vigilance but to otherwise continue our normal activities.
He’s right, I think, but I hope this sort of event doesn’t start happening every week.
For the last couple of weeks, all my blogging energy has been concentrated in a school assignment, hence the lack of updates here.
At the Thunderbird, our online student publication, I’m writing a blog about 21st century state-building twice a week. It’s not actually that different from what I do here.
So, if you like what you’ve seen, take a look at my Thunderbird blog.
I may even cross-post it someday, who knows.
