O'Connor out?

It depends on whether CTV's "sources" are good.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper will demote embattled Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor in a cabinet shuffle expected in the week of August 13, senior government insiders told CTV News.

No speculation on what post he would get, but I'd suspect Veterans Affairs if Greg Thompson moves to Revenue.

Sources say the Prime Minister decided he had to shift O'Connor out of Defence after he gave an interview on CTV's Question Period two weeks ago, in which he suggested Quebec's famed Van Doos would spend their six-month mission in Afghanistan training Afghan army troops rather than fighting the Taliban.

Families who lost loved ones in Afghanistan were deeply upset at O'Connor as were members of the Van Doos, government officials told CTV.

Gen. Rick Hillier, Chief of the Defence Staff, had to step in and assure the country that the Quebec-based Van Doos would not be confined to the Kandahar air base.

There is something bothersome about that assessement. O'Connor has been a weak cabinet minister from the start. He has certainly been the vortex around which much more major issues have circled. He runs a slip-shod office and makes public pronouncements without having the facts properly checked. He should have been dumped long ago.

It sounded like Harper's message that O'Connor voiced on CTV's Question Period. Certainly it had no basis in fact since the Afghan National Army is nowhere near ready to take on operations on the scale conducted by NATO forces. But given the control exercised by the PMO over cabinet ministers' speeches and appearances, it hardly seems likely that O'Connor would have gone so far off message as to get himself fired, particularly after Harper had preserved him through much more contentious issues.

The following week, when Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier contradicted O'Connor on Question Period, it became obvious that the upper levels of National Defence Headquarters were embroiled in a nasty fight.

The CTV report uses an interesting line: "... had to step in ... ". It begs the question: Who had the approved message?

I'll say both did.

O'Connor was expressing the Harper government's desire to convey to the population of Quebec that their recently deployed sons and daughters would not encounter the same level of face-to-face Taliban encounters, thus the chance of casualties would be reduced.

When the rest of the country reacted with anger over what appeared to be a politically motivated decision to mollify Quebec voters, not to mention the outrage in the ranks of the Royal 22nd Regiment, something had to be done. The trial balloon had fallen flat.

When Hillier spoke a week later, he was carrying somebody's message and it wasn't O'Connor's. It might have been his own mind but it is far more likely that Hillier was issuing a PMO approved line. When questioned on O'Connor's claim of being able to place Canadian troops into a near reserve status in Kandahar, the message was: I don't think so.

One can only speculate on the negotiations which occurred, but Hillier's previous contradiction of O'Connor over the creation of 14 territorial battalions, which went completely unchallenged, suggests that Hillier has known of the impending demise of O'Connor for some time now. That would put the decision to replace O'Connor to a time before his comments on Question Period and before July 25th.

The final line of the CTV report attributes O'Connor with achievements.

Despite these troubles, O'Connor has managed to win cabinet approval for the purchase of $22 billion of new military hardware, the largest buildup since the Second World War.

Well, technically, that would possess some accuracy. Let's not forget that Harper is a military groupie and O'Connor had pre-approval from the head of the cabinet table to go on a spending spree. He did it, by the way, without having the long-overdue and promised Defence Review as a guidance document. So, all that hardware has been purchased as an urgent in-theatre requirement for the Afghanistan mission, or it comes without the services' requesting it to meet defence policy, or it was a part of the previous government's defence policy, which is the only policy guideline the armed forces currently have to work with.

If O'Connor goes on August 13th, my prediction will have been off by three weeks.