Second Thots

Liberal leader Stéphane Dion delivers a rather interesting response to an article that accused him of being bought by ethnic communities on the matter of provisions in the anti-terror legislation.

I find it interesting in part because he spends precisely one paragraph, out of a total of eleven in the article, dealing with the specific allegation made in the Jonathan Kay piece published earlier in the week, also in the National Post. Here's Dion's money paragraph:

I would have also told Mr. Kay that the sunsetting of these two provisions was never discussed at any time with any leadership contender as a condition of support at the leadership convention. And far from extracting any kind of price for their support, Liberal MPs such as Navdeep Bains and Omar Alghabra encouraged members of newer Canadian cultural communities to get democratically engaged in politics for the candidate they believed in, not even seeking traditional campaign titles for themselves in return.

This is a rather oddly constructed paragraph — the kind that lawyers love to write, in fact.

Kay's central allegation is that Bains and Alghabra delivered all their delegates, first to Kennedy, then to Dion, partly on the promise that the anti-terror provisions would be killed.

Does the above paragraph refute the allegation? I guess some lawyers must think so.

However, I do find it odd that, in an article designed to rebut the Jonathan Kay accusations, Stéphane Dion delivers one carefully worded paragraph that directly deals with the charge made.

To top it all of — and this seems to be a habit of Dion's — he finishes the article with a personal attack of his own on his critics:

Michael Ignatieff, Gerard Kennedy and myself also had significant numbers of Sikh-Canadian delegates. This is not a surprise since we each had campaigns that appealed to Canadians of all creeds, colours and ethnicity. Such inclusivity may confuse people like Mr. Kay but it is irresponsible of him to suggest that the only possible explanation for such participation by ethnic minorities in politics is a nefarious plot to undermine national security.

The Liberal Party of Canada will not be intimidated away from its agenda of protecting Canadians' security and their human rights with equal vigour, certainly not by the personal attacks of Prime Minister Harper and Mr. Kay.

Does this response from Mr. Dion answer all the questions involved, or does it open the door to even more questions about his leadership and how he captured it?