Fortunately for Liberal MP Garth Turner, the presence of the second reporter eliminates uncomfortable questions regarding his ability to distinguish gender:
Meanwhile, on Friday afternoon my office received a call from Stuart Service, another local reporter for the larger circulation Halton Compass, who was also in the room. (Originally I had thought Stuart was the author of the words in question, which is why I’d referred to the reporter in the masculine.)
Phew!
But what of the tape that Stuart Service made of the end of the discussion?
As you know we live in a time that is complex and is contradictory. You know our country is at war. Our country is spending $150,000 on every artillery shell that we’re shooting in Afghanistan. Those artillery shells have GPS. They’ve got computers in the tips of them. And those computers fulfill no function but to guide that shell from our Canadian Army howitzers into villages to kill people. I mean that’s a reality.
It would have been better if Garth Turner had said that the targets were specific people. As it is, I can see why Melanie Cummings heard what she heard, and that was that the shells were "bought for the sole purpose of destroying a village in Afghanistan".
Garth Turner's actual words, assuming the tape transcription is accurate? The shells have "no function but to guide that shell into villages to kill people".
[For those who are curious, here is the Stuart Service report on Garth Turner's meeting.]
An Apology: In retrospect, I think it is miserly not to offer an apology to Garth Turner for developing a story around what is now known to be an error in transcription. Garth Turner's choice of words were sloppy. Omitting "Taliban" from the target description is notable, especially when there are Canadians out there who are quick to assume that Canadian soldiers (and any soldier from a Western nation) are war criminals laying waste to Afghanistan in support of oil interests (or something like that). There is no reason to give the radical left any reason, however slight, to think they are right in their absurd and scurrilous descriptions of Canada's brave men and women. Canadian politicians speak with particular authority on matters of military policy, and so have a particular responsibility to be careful in how they describe the actions and tactics of Canadian soldiers. But it occurs to me, after a personally difficult weekend (the details of which are unrelated to this issue), that any such radical taking comfort in Garth Turner's words are taking slight comfort indeed, since one sloppy turn of phrase does not erase the fact that Garth Turner has consistently voted for the mission. So Garth, don't forget to mention the Taliban in the future when mentioning who is being targeted by Canadian soldiers (there are those who would like to see women and children in the crosshairs in order to advance their own agenda). And for goodness sake, if you know the quote was wrong, just say it was wrong. I left the door wide open for that explanation right from the beginning, and no one went through it. Faced with a quote that no one would definitively say was wrong, and some people said was right on the money (including you, in a roundabout way), I continued down the only path open. Now I have to climb back.
