Choose your own foreign policy

Jim Travers theorizes on the rise of Peter Kent.

Gaza, a crisis with troubling similarities to the 2006 Israeli adventure in south Lebanon that exposed Harper’s foreign policy inexperience, is being presented subtly to Quebec by Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon and aggressively in the rest of Canada by his junior minister and rookie MP Peter Kent... having been burned once by the Middle East, Harper is now letting ministers aim one message at Palestinian sympathetic Quebec and another at more pro-Israel audiences elsewhere.

(Is this really possible? Are left-wing Quebecers unable or unwilling to read what’s being written elsewhere? Doesn’t the Internet render this sort of stuff rather moot?)

Meanwhile, Kent’s previously stated claim to clarity on the issue of humanitarian disasters in the region would seem to put him somewhat out of step with both the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.