On NSICOP, we don’t need names. We need action.

Time to put country before party. Will our leaders step up to the plate?

To name or not to name? That’s the question hanging over Ottawa like a bad smell, ever since the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) report revealed that a slew of MPs and Senators have been “wittingly assisting” foreign governments. This assistance includes:

“communicating frequently with foreign missions before or during a political campaign to obtain support from community groups or businesses; accepting knowingly or through willful blindness funds or benefits from foreign missions or their proxies; providing foreign diplomatic officials with privileged information on the work or opinions of fellow Parliamentarians; responding to the requests or direction of foreign officials to improperly influence parliamentary colleagues or parliamentary business; and providing information learned in confidence from the government to a known intelligence officer of a foreign state.”

It’s a laundry list of malfeasance with an underlying theme: treason. The T word hasn’t been spoken so many times in one week since Canada’s lone political sexpionage scandal, the Munsinger Affair of 1966. Spy capers didn’t seem to be a Canadian problem – or so we wanted to believe. Now we know otherwise, and the question is: what will we do about it?