Ethical Amnesia: Confused As Harper

I’ve been misquoted as Stephen Harper by multiple public forum commenters at the Huffington Post, CTV News forum and on Facebook! The misquote was so plausible, and written originally by Kevin Wood, that I spent some time (like Stephen Lautens) trying to trace its source in newspapers. I couldn’t find it, because it was originally written by Kevin last year, not said by Harper ten years ago.

“At worst…” is not by Stephen Harper, it’s by me, quoting Kevin. I asked readers to consider the quote in the context of Adscam. Less careful readers took it as one of the very hypocritical quotes that are easy to find when pre-PM Harper used to go on about government accountability and his plans to fix the system.

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Here’s another important Kev quote, also made relevant again by recent news:

In investigating a crime, one looks at who had means and motive. The Conservative Party of Canada has a massive database of voter information going back several elections. Their people regularly brag about it. They have shown, at the highest levels of the party, their willingness to break election law in the past. They had the means and the motive. It is simply a matter of finding the fingerprints on the knife sticking out of the back of democracy at this point.