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Like much of the nation, I have been riveted by the high-stakes test of wills between government and opposition over who should brief whom about what with regard to l’affaire Atwal.

As I need hardly recapitulate, the Conservatives had demanded the prime minister’s National Security and Intelligence Adviser, Daniel Jean, appear before a Commons committee to answer questions about his timely intervention on behalf of the prime minister’s ass during what is now universally known as His Disastrous Trip to India.

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Among other embarrassments, the trip had been all but derailed by the revelation that a former member of a Sikh terrorist group, Jaspal Atwal, convicted in the 1986 attempted murder of a visiting Indian cabinet minister on Vancouver Island, had twice been invited by the Canadian High Commission to attend receptions in the prime minister’s honour.

That was before Jean, a career civil servant and the most senior member of the national security establishment, contacted members of the national press to suggest, off the record, that Atwal’s appearances had in fact been orchestrated by rogue elements within the Indian government to make the government of Canada look soft on terrorism and sow discord with India.