Question: Pretend you are a candidate for election and you feel that you embody the character and spirit of a local well loved former politician. Wouldn't you first check with the politician's widow before weaving a narrative for yourself that borrows if not steals the coattails of her husband's career?

Apparently if you are Ryan Hastman, the Conservative candidate for Edmonton-Strathcona, you don't feel so obligated. Rabble.ca carries the story:

At an all-candidates' meeting Tuesday on the University of Alberta campus, Decore's widow emotionally stood up and took Hastman to task for using her husband's name in an attempt to advance Prime Minister Harper's neo-con agenda.

"It's insulting. He's a man who is nothing like you," Anne Marie Decore told the 200 students at the forum. "To try and ride the coattails of a man who has been dead 12 years is repugnant.

"My husband's ideals and beliefs were not like this Tory government of Mr. Hastman's!"

Given the orange crush sweeping the country, will we next find Stephen Harper channeling Tommy Douglas?

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!

Courtesy the Toronto Sun's ever-attentive Susan Delacourt, Aid groups advised to "shut the f--- up" on abortion:

Aid experts alarmed by Canada's new anti-abortion stand in foreign policy have been advised to "shut the f--- up", or risk Prime Minister Stephen Harper taking even more harsh measures - abroad, or maybe even at home if abortion becomes an election issue.

Listen up. (MP3)

Stephen Harper Is A Terrible Human Resources Chief

In 2007 Stephen Harper punted from caucus MP Bill Casey, a popular, hard-working, constituency-focussed MP of many years. Why? Because Mr. Casey had the temerity to stand up for his constituents. Casey subsequently ran again as an independent while Conservatives vowed to bring him down. Result? Casey won by a landslide and continues to earn the respect of his constituents to this day, his last day as an MP. Bad staff decision, Mr. Harper, Canadians want more MPs like Bill Casey.

Another bad decision? Stephen Harper appoints to the Senate Mike Duffy, one of the most transparently partisan "journalists" ever to grace the small screen in the history of this country. Mr. Duffy knows nothing of propriety or of fair play. Yesterday Canadians got to see a true reflection of Mike Duffy's persona bubble to the surface. As CanWest's Don Martin wrote today:

Congratulations Senator Mike Duffy, you've finally done it.

With his wild rant on a CBC national politics show this week, the television icon has accomplished the difficult feat of offending all those in his parliamentary orbit -- his former journalistic occupation, the Conservative party, senators, MPs and even the prime minister who appointed him. Don Martin, National Post, November 06, 2009

Martin concluded "Mike Duffy's only value has become that of poster boy for why the Senate needs, at very least, major reform if not outright abolition."

Appointing Duffy to the Senate might have seemed like a good idea to Stephen Harper, but to the rest of Canada Duffy represents everything in politics we want to see less of.

Canada's human resources clerk in chief, Stephen Harper, sure makes some back-assward personnel choices, doesn't he?

I can't believe I just heard Minister of Environment Jim Prentice exclaim in Question Period in reference to Copenhagen climate change talks:

We will not be the boy scouts at the table! Jim Prentice

Jim: the fact is most Canadians want Canada to be the boy scouts at that table.

I'm under no illusions that the Conservatives ever plan on being environmentally responsible. To them the only thing than matters is being responsible to business. Big business, increasingly owned by foreigners.

When Prentice says a key climate change report is irresponsible (Globe and Mail, Thursday Oct 29, 2009) he neglects to consider that the federal and Alberta governments have been giving the oil sands industry a free pass for the past thirty years. That of course was the plan all along - allow this incredibly dirty industry to grow unchecked and unsullied by meaningful regulation such that huge economic pain would be the consequence of real action too-late down the road.

Canadians have always wanted to be the boy scouts at the table, but our politicians have largely always stood in the way.

Even if the H1N1 virus is on balance producing a relatively mild illness in the vast majority of people, the real point I fear will be lost in the final analysis is that the government had, and blew, the perfect opportunity this flu season to demonstrate that we are prepared for a pandemic episode of a more debilitating nature. We may uneasily skate through this in the end but all thanks will be to a microscopic virus, not the actions of the government.

The one important thing they could have done well in advance of vaccine distribution is public education; instead we have Vancouver SkyTrain and Toronto Go trains decked out with gratuitous advertising.

Since Health Canada have abdicated their responsibilities, local and national TV appear to now be shouldering the burden of educating the public but only after much confusion and misinformation has already been widely disseminated.

One does not have to be partisan to identify the failure of the government and in particular the health minister has certainly not acquitted herself well on this file.

Prescription: resignation.

Maybe HarpEr Hard At Work (HEHAW) will become a regular feature here.

Today's HEHAW installment, quoting The Globe and Mail:

They asked for help and got body bags.

Aboriginal leaders said they were outraged and confused by deliveries of dozens of body bags to remote Manitoba reserves, as native communities demanded federal resources to fight a second wave of the H1N1 outbreak. (Globe and Mail, Wednesday Sept. 16 2009) More >

Related update:

Swine flu hits Ahousat First Nation on Vancouver Island

The expected "second wave" of H1N1 flu has hit on the west coast of Vancouver Island, according to the Canadian Medical Association Journal. (The Tyee, Thursday Sept. 17 2009) More >

Tom Hanson/CP

Stephen Joseph Harper should get a time out for attacking Dion over a flubbed interview (Video for those who have not seen it as yet). Its the worst sort of attack the style, not discuss the substance, politics.

Whether its attacking personal traits, misrepresenting the ideas of others (bluntly: telling lies), muzzling most of your candidates, engaging in what are probably illegal in and out campaign financing schemes, subverting democracy, Harper willingly choses the politics of attack and division over that of ideas and substance. CTV running an interview they said they would not is also rather interesting.

Click for details

The whole scenario reminds me a lot of Kim Campbell's 1993 election campaign where her team decided to run an attack ad directed at Jean Chrétien which featured the former prime minister's facial deformity prominently. The ad backfired, and while it didn't directly cause the destruction of the Progressive Conservative Party, it certainly helped.

Speaking as an anglophone who from time to time tries to ressurect his Grade 12 French, and as someone who has also spent some time in predominantly French-only parts of the country such as Chicoutimi, I immediately recognize the confusion introduced into the interview by this question:

If you were prime minister now, what would you have done about this economy and this crisis. CTV interviewer

Different tenses, present and past. This messes me up all the time when I'm thinking in English but speaking French. In the interview Dion gets a little flustered but it seems to me that he is trying to be sure of the tense so that he can reply to the question. Of course it goes from bad to worse, yet eventually a clean cut is done. CTV runs the out-takes as a story itself, a decision which one might rightly question.

Its been said that the good people of Quebec give Harper a lot of credit for speaking to them in their language, however imperfect it has been over the years. We anglos should be doing the same for Mr. Dion.

For a more humorous version of my outrage, one would be hard pressed to do better than this video:

Harper Conservatives steal another page from Australian electoral playbook

Harper Conservatives are not only plagiarizing speeches from the Aussies, supporting the Iraq War like the Aussies, now we see evidence Harper's gang are lifting their election tactics straight out of the Australian handbook:

Click to visit video site

It should be noted that the Aussie election advertisement was part of a failed attempt by Howard to hold onto power - his party not only lost the election to the Labour Party but Howard himself lost his own seat, making him only the second Australian prime minister in history to exit with such ingnominy.

Full points to the Liberal war room which has been doing a bang up job at unearthing these Howard-Harper relationships, rightfully highlighting that Harper's bunch are yet another bunch neoconservative war-mongering ideologues.

Update: The deeply conservative Liberal Party of Australia (yes, I know its hard to keep track of who is who in the zoo and what side of the political spectrum they are on - just know that Aussie "Liberals" are basically the same as Bush Republicans and Harper Conservatives) has an on-line election reminder on their home page pointing back to the Conservative Party of Canada.

Aussie and Canadian conservatives in bed together

LIBERAL: Say it isn't so, Stéphane! On a day where a third allegation of plagiarism against Stephen Harper surfaces, Stéphane Dion is shown to have delivered a speech in 2005 containing text apparently lifted from a speech presented by Dr. Robert Corell of the American Meteorological Society before a 2004 U.S. Senate committee on the environment.

Lets see where that goes.

Update: Not very far.

NDP: Is the NDP's Deputy Leader Thomas Mulcair really in favour of exporting bulk water from Canada? Maybe M. Mulcair is a little, er, wet behind the ears?

“But if there are areas where I can't have a bottling plant, for all sorts of reasons, but I can export, and I am able to ensure the continuity of resources, and it will bring something to the region, why wouldn't I do it? It's like saying: all our trees in Quebec should stay where they are. They should never be cut. This is a renewable resource, not like mining you know. As soon as you extract the minerals, it's over. But this is water. If we manage it correctly, if we take care of it like we should, why can't we even talk about it? It's this quasi-religious approach that I cannot figure out, Mme. Speaker.” Former Quebec National Assembly Minister of Environment Thomas Mulcair

Besides being against NDP policy, most New Democrats and more than a few Liberals would deploy water torture rather than approve bulk water exports.

Stephen Harper has refused to rule out such a policy. Readers are left to their imagination as to Harper's views on water torture. PS: Someone should inform Mr. Mulclair about that pesky NAFTA treaty and the proportionality clause which, while attached to oil at present. would certainly be pushed by the U.S. to be attached to something even more important than oil... water.

mike watkins dot ca, a more or less equal opportunity critic