Blunder (from the latin for "screw up big time") <===that is a lie

Ok, so Abdou Diouf, the Secretary-General of la Francophonie and former President of Senegal arrives in Canada, on his way to Manitoba where the organization is having it's annual meeting.

He's traveling under a diplomatic passport. None of the news stories tell me which kind, but I guess it could be a Senegalese one, or it could be one issued via the Francophonie, or it could be the Big Mac Daddy of diplomatic passports and could be documentation issued by the UN (the Francophonie is a sister/cousin organization).

In any case, the deal is that poeple with legitimate diplomatic passports are not subjected to the "rubber glove, bend over and give me two good coughs" treatment. Not if they're from bad bad countries and certainly not when they are from friendly, benign countries like Senegal and really not when they are from nice organizations like la Francophonie.

So M. Diouf arrives at Lester B Airport and some helpful people from the Canadian Boarder Security whatsit decide that this set of niceties doesn't really hold true today.

The Globe had a little piece on how Peter McKay was going to appologize and how some Liberals
figured that someone was meant to meet M. Diouf at the airport (CPC folks say no, but it seems to me that everyone gets met at the airport, even if it's by some deputy minster).

Anyway the kicker line in the Globe article was this :

"And nobody in government was prepared to say exactly what was done to Mr. Diouf. The Canada Border Security Agency, which is responsible for screening people coming into the country, referred calls to the Foreign Affairs Department. The Foreign Affairs Department would not discuss the matter. The Prime Minister's Office did not return phone calls."

So, not only do we have a diplomat being manhandled for sport, we have another instance of the new government being so intent on staying on their political message that no one can comment.

About anything.

Except Peter, who will probably be told off for admitting there was something to apologize for.