By Lloyd Mackey

WHETHER or not the Afghanistan detainee issue goes into hibernation during the next few weeks, there is one particular aspect that I hope ultimately receives some attention.

That aspect relates to the role that the chair of the Afghanistan cabinet committee, Stockwell Day, played in the issue. During the early days of the new Harper government in 2006 and 2007, Day was public safety minister.

We have heard very little of Day's perspective, perhaps because the opposition parties have been focused on questions about the roles of his cabinet colleagues, then defence minister Gordon O'Connor and then foreign affairs minister Peter MacKay.

Keeping in mind that the Canadian Afghanistan operation was about the three Ds -- defence, diplomacy and development -- Day's role in Canada-Afghan relations in those early days was very much concerned with 'on-the-ground' diplomacy.

Under his watch as public safety minister, one of the Canadian 'diplomacy' tasks was to train Afghan police and corrections officers, hopefully imbuing them with 'Canadian' values with respect to the balancing of human rights and lawful incarceration.

In these last days before Christmas, I would like to postulate that Day may well have had something unique to offer. That is because his particular faith-based background permitted him to have a biblically-rooted understanding of conflict and restorative justice.

Space does not permit my defending this thesis to any deep extent -- only to say that one might look to the faith-based work of such distinguished Canadians as Eleanor Clitheroe and Pierre Allard.Ê

Allard, a Baptist minister and former chaplain general for Corrections Canada has been working in Rwanda in recent months, in a situation that is arguably even more complex than that of Afghanistan.

Clitheroe is a lawyer who, after being deposed as head of Ontario's Hydro One almost a decade ago, became an Anglican minister and is now head of the Canadian section of Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship.

In their separate and sometimes overlapping spheres, both Clitheroe and Allard practice and advocate biblically-based restorative justice and conflict management concepts. And both can point to some spiritually and politically encouraging results of having remained faithful to those concepts.

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This brings us back to Day. While he made some miscues with regard to how he communicated faith values earlier in his career, he has proven to be a quick study of biblical restorative justice principles, listening seriously to people who can interpret those principles.

It was interesting to note Day's implied enunciation of biblically-rooted leadership and diplomatic concepts early on in the Harper government's efforts to take over the Afghan conflict tasks from its Liberal predecessors. Indeed, any informed Christian leader would have been able to readily identify those roots by simply reading between the lines.

They are concepts that would have found support, not only from Stephen Harper, but also from the person that the prime minister called on to study and recommend on the Afghan operation -- former Liberal foreign minister John Manley.

There is a small wrinkle, of course, in trying to help Afghan prison workers to apply Western-based restorative justice principles. The Islamic-based culture of that nation has a different cluster of sacred writings, imbuing its leaders with an arguably different set of justice and human rights values. It is an understatement to suggest that communicating across such cultural barriers is challenging, especially where defence, diplomacy and development all must share the same platform.

I recognize, as well, that some interpreters of the scriptures of Christianity and Judaism often want to leave out consideration of biblical restorative justice concepts and concentrate more on the issues of retribution and punishment.

It is my fond wish at Christmas that 2010 might lead our politicians, in opposition and government alike, to ferret out the ways in which biblical values might have been applied by Canadians in the Afghan setting.

Both my wife Edna and I would like to wish OttawaWatch readers the best at Christmas.

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Lloyd Mackey is a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa and author of Stephen Harper: The Case for Collaborative Governance (ECW Press, 2006), More Faithful Than We Think: Stories and Insights on Canadian Leaders Doing Politics Christianly (BayRidge Books, 2005) and Like Father, Like Son: Ernest Manning and Preston Manning (ECW Press, 1997). Lloyd can be reached at lmackey@canadianchristianity.com.

December 22/2009