Cabinet people are the government so when a Cabinet person says stuff like this, it's a reflection of his or her government, party leader, and party.
There's a reason why when you take a Government portfolio job you first sign your resignation letter without dating it. You are responsible to your department, prime minister, the crown, the people, and your party. What you say as a cabinet member reflects the 'will of the cabinet' so to speak.
If the Foreign Minister said something off the cuff about another country, you'd have an international incident with massive apologies from the government to whatever country it was and most likely the foreign minister would resign if not, confidence vote would happen on the government, I think.
So in this election time its, "so this is really the people Stephen Harper picks to run the government? These are the people he choses to represent us?"
Yeah it's a political issue, but it strikes at what I think a government in this country is suppose to do. If you can't have confidence in the leader of the party who is the Prime Minister to put decent responsible people in government positions, why should he or she be allowed to govern?
It's one thing for a back bencher like Carolyn Parrish to mouth off about Americans to the press, she would just hurt her party (and herself) and all the Prime Minister would have to do is say "she doesn't represent the view of this government, but we allow many different points of view in our party and in our caucus meetings, and she was just upset over the presidential election, she gets too emotional sometimes, because she cares so much about the world." If she was in government, then she'd hurt the government to the point an election would of had to have been called, because you can't have a cabinet member saying that another country's citizens are 'bastards'.
