President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper give a joint news conference at 1445 Tuesday. It will be held in Parliament's Centre Block. Though there are roughly 300 or so members of Canada's Parliamentary Press Gallery, just 40 will be allowed inside the press conference room. And even though (or so we are told) there are 70 members of the White House Press Corps travelling with Obama tomorrow, they too, will only get 40 seats.

I can tell you that dozens upon dozens of Canadian journalists from outside Ottawa asked for accreditation for this event, most of which will be disappointed.

Blame the PMO or the White House if you will. The PMO is supposed to be calling the shots here but we suspect the White House is pulling many of the strings.

In any event, the 80 journalists in the room will get precisely four questions before the leaders leave. Two questions will be asked by the American journalists and two questions will be asked by the Canadians. Of course, as we are a bilingual country, that means one question goes to English language journalists and one to the other solitude.

So here's the quandary: What question do you think Global National, National Post, the Vancouver Sun, Ottawa Citizen, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, CTV, CBC, the Canadian Press and others can all agree on? Something about the economy? Cross-border trade? Afghanistan? Omar Khadr?

I won't be in that room (I'm tasked with some other Obama-related work tomorrow) and won't have any input on that discussion but, if I if I did get a chance to ask the new Prez a question, I would argue that we should ask Obama about Maher Arar.

Our government, after all, paid Arar $10 million after a judicial inquiry established he did nothing wrong and suffered grievously because of the mistakes of our security services and those of the United States. Prime Minister Harper apologized to Arar. Today, the New York Times says Obama ought to do the same. So why not invite President Obama to do just that during his visit to the Centre Block of Canada's House of Commons. That’s not just a “Canada” question. The Times also reports today that though Obama’s administration may close Gitmo, it looks to continue the ethically dodgy practice of rendering — the very practice that led to Arar’s torture. Asking about Arar, then, would give some insight as to just how far this new president is prepared to distance himself from the often controversial anti-terror policies of his predecessor. And that's something the whole world would like to know about.

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