Aug 23 2006

You've heard this one: a man walks into a bar in Mexico and meets a beautiful girl.

A couple of drinks, some flirtatious conversation and the next thing he knows, he's lying in some alley with a six-inch crude stitching job across his abdomen.

Sounds too exaggerated to be true. Much like the accusation that China is harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners and selling them to the highest bidders.

But David Kilgour, a former Crown prosecutor in Manitoba, MP of 26 years and Secretary of State for Asia and the Pacific in 2002 and 2003, maintains he's uncovered evidence that this is not the fiction of some gothic horror film.

In his recently released report, Kilgour includes evidence from former prisoners who said they saw Falun Gong practitioners being kept as a live human organ bank, the former wife of a surgeon alleged to have removed 2,000 corneas from involuntary victims, and live interviews between hospital staff and an undercover organ buyer.

By his calculations 41,000 transplants were unaccounted for in 2000 - meaning 41,000 transplants were performed, but no records of the donors exist.

As one interviewer in Australia put it: either this is a new form of evil or it's an incredibly sophisticated hoax that makes the Hitler Diaries seem simplistic.

At the very least, given Kilgour's reputation and stature, this report deserves closer investigation by the United Nations.

He has called upon Manfred Novak, the UN's rapporteur on torture (who knew such an office existed?) to investigate. Kilgour is also asking Amnesty International to look into the matter.

After all, Kilgour says, in 1943 no one believed reports of the atrocities being committed in Germany's gas chambers.

If the allegations are true, the practice must be stopped. If they are false, the Chinese government deserves to be exonerated of these serious charges.

Remember that old expression too many cooks spoil the broth?

Apparently, it's not a concept Premier Gordon Campbell has taken into account when appointing ministers of children and family development.

When his party was elected in 2001, Campbell promised major changes at the ministry, which was deeply troubled under the NDP and heavily criticized by the opposition Liberals.

But, as his year's scandal over the government's failure to investigate child deaths revealed, few of the ministry's long-standing problems have been resolved.

Even after it was humiliated over its handling of the Sherry Charlie case, the government continued to play politics with the ministry and deflect blame away from the deep budget cuts that led to the mishandling of Charlie's file and may have contributed to her death.

In that light, it's difficult to applaud Campbell's decision to appoint Okanagan-Shuswap MLA Tom Christensen as the latest head of the volatile children and families portfolio, not because Christensen is ill-suited to the post but because this is clearly a ministry that needs some strong, consistent leadership.

In the last five years, the ministry has had four ministers - Gordon Hogg, Christy Clark, Stan Hagen and now Christensen. (Since 1991 there have been 11 ministers).

Given the steep learning curve these candidates face once they get the job, and the continuing inability of this government to get it right, leaving ministers in the post a little longer would seem to be a better option.

Since nothing else has worked, maybe it's time Campbell tried a little consistency instead of kicking the children and families portfolio around like the political football it has been for the last 15 years.