Updated through the day when so moved...

Here for Canada? Not when its inconvenient: (April 8, 2011 - James Fitz-Morris, CBC News)

As anyone even closely following this election knows by now, the campaign slogan for the Conservatives is "Here for Canada." But Veterans Affairs Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn is among those who has a different take on his party's "Here for Canada" campaign slogan. His riding of Jonquiere-Alma is in the middle of the Saguenay -- a region of Quebec considered the heartland of the sovereignty movement. [... Instead] the slogan here is "Notre Region au Pouvoir" (Our Region in Power).

Downplaying Federalism seems to work for the party in this part of the country -- where the Conservatives hold two of the three seats.

Why does the Conservative Party, which claims to be "Here for Canada", allow its Quebecois candidates to adopt a nationalistic tone that panders to sovereigntist mores at the local level?

Stephen Harper in 2004 said "exploiting a nationalist strategy in Quebec" is as a strategy "fundamentally mistaken":

Conservatives have also observed that, when they came to power in Canada in the past century, they did so in coalition with the province's so-called "nationalist" forces. This lesson has been interpreted by the Canadian Alliance as meaning that the party should position itself as a nationalist force in Quebec and focus on the significant anti-Liberal vote. To the extent that it had a Quebec strategy, the Reform Party before it tended to think the same way. Over the past few years I have concluded that this strategy is fundamentally mistaken. Stephen Harper, 2004

Apparently in 2011 that view has changed. Exploit away, Jean-Pierre and the rest of the Quebec team! Pork-barrel politics is the same in any language, right Larry Smith?

Why is the @PMHarper Twitter account, verified by Twitter as belonging to Stephen Harper, following the porn-industry related account @freepornpics?

Apparently @PMHarper has been following @freepornpics for quite some time. In the blog Morton's Musings, James C Morton (a candidate for the Liberals in Oshawa) apparently first noted the connection back on August 3, 2010.

Sure enough, the twitter relationship is still there as of this writing. I confirmed the linkage by using the Twitter Application Program Interface to download a list of numerical user ID's -- used internally by Twitter -- relating to the followers of @freepornpics, and sure enough @PMHarper's id is among those ids.

Stephen Harper's @PMHarper numerical twitter id is 7401202. @freepornpics numerical twitter id is: 38949870. With that information in hand we can search the list of numerical twitter ids for @freepornpics followers to see if @PMHarper's id is within the data. It is:

$ curl http://twitter.com/followers/ids.xml?screen_name=freepornpics >freepornpics-twitter-followers
$ grep 7401202 freepornpics-twitter-followers
<id>7401202</id>

It will probably comfort Stephen Harper to know that @freepornpics also returns the favour and follows @PMHarper right back:

$ curl http://twitter.com/followers/ids.xml?screen_name=PMHarper >pmharper-twitter-followers
$ grep 38949870 harper-twitter-followers
<id>38949870</id>

Apparently pornographers are interested in Stephen Harper too. That's quite a big blue tent Harper has, uh, erected.

One doubts that Stephen Harper gets up late at night to surf the internet for porn but he ought to at least face the question.

Help yourself to the images or data!