Camille Labchuk

All week long, we’ve been hearing about how Conservative MPs have placed their party’s logo on gigantic prop cheques used for photo ops when MPs deliver economic stimulus plan funds to communities. The consensus is that this is an unwarranted insertion of partisanship into a supposedly non-partisan delivery of these dollars, as they are taxpayers’ dollars, NOT a present from the Conservative Party to Canadians. So maybe it’s foolish of me to actually be surprised by the news that bloggers have caught Harper hijacking the government’s Economic Action Plan website with a link to the infamous Beatles YouTube video of Harper performing a Beatles tune at an arts gala the other week. Just click on the YouTube link, top right, and that’s the first video you’ll see.

Call me an idealist, but shouldn’t a Government of Canada website designed, ostensibly, to inform Canadians about the action plan — which is a government initiative, carried out with government dollars — link to information about the actual plan, and not Harper’s latest piano PR ploys?

Harper’s Conservatives ran on an ethics and accountability platform in 2006 and as an opposition politician, he took every opportunity to call out the Liberals when they pulled stunts like this. But Harper has risen (descended?) to new heights of hypocrisy, breaking new ground and long ago surpassing the Liberals when it comes to partisan self-promotion. (He’s probably got the Liberals beat on partonage appointments to the Senate, judiciary, and administrative bodies, too, but that’s a post for another day.)

And they wonder why fewer and fewer Canadians bother to vote.