The Liberals maintained their attack today on a plagiarized speech given by Stephen Harper when he was Opposition leader in 2003 in support of the war in Iraq.
Liberal MP Ken Dryden quipped during a campaign speech in Fredericton that he wanted to make a full disclosure that he wrote his own words.
A Conservative campaign worker resigned Tuesday after the Liberals revealed similarities and nearly verbatim passages between the speech given by Mr. Harper and one read days earlier by then Australian prime minister John Howard
Mr. Dryden's speech also attacked the Conservative leader for his ads that show him in a blue sweater vest.
He says that's an attempt to portray the prime minister as “Mr. Nice Guy.”
But Mr. Dryden says nice guys don't cut literacy programs and funding for groups that work on behalf of women, aboriginals, the poor and disabled.
Owen Lippert resigned from his job as a research for the Conservative election campaign on Tuesday after admitted he wrote the contentious 2003 speech.
Mr. Lippert said he was working in Mr. Harper's office when he was asked to write the speech for the then-opposition-leader to deliver in the House of Commons the day the United States began bombing Baghdad.
Large chunks were taken from a speech given by Mr. Howard in the Australian Parliament two days earlier.
“Pressed for time, I was overzealous in copying segments of another world leader's speech,” Mr. Lippert said in a statement issued by the Conservative Party, five hours after the Tories accused the Liberals of “desperation” and “gotcha journalism” in revealing the plagiarism.
“Neither my superiors in the office of the leader of the opposition nor the leader of the opposition was aware that I had done so,” Mr. Lippert said. “I apologize to all involved and have resigned my position from the Conservative campaign.”
The similarities in the two speeches, delivered on March 18 and 20, 2003, were made public Tuesday during a speech in Toronto by Liberal MP Bob Rae. A Liberal strategist said the party discovered them almost by accident while doing research on the Internet two months ago.
The strategist said a junior staffer, who asked not to be identified, was doing a Google search on Mr. Harper, George W. Bush and the war in Iraq and came across a link to Mr. Howard's speech.
“A little bell went off – ‘I have heard that language before' – and the rest, as they say, is history,” the strategist said. The Liberals did not release the information until Tuesday because they were waiting to receive a videotape of Mr. Howard's speech from Australia, the strategist said.
“Initially, when all we had was the paper copies of the speeches, we would place them side by side, and sometimes you would actually not be able to tell whose speech was whose,” the strategist said.
Mr. Howard's office did not return calls seeking comment on Tuesday.
Mr. Rae said the copied speech is evidence that Canada is losing its own voice in foreign policy under the Conservatives. He said the country has become a parrot of right-wing interests from the United States and other foreign countries.
“How does a leader in Canada's Parliament, on such a crucial issue, end up giving almost the exact same speech as any other country's leader, let alone a leader who was a key member of George W. Bush's coalition of the willing?” Mr. Rae said.
Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion also condemned the copied speech, saying Mr. Harper should be “expelled” from his party.
“He's unable to choose his own words,” Mr. Dion said. “Canadians want their country [to] speak with its own voice on the world stage.”
Mr. Harper's friend, Ken Boessenkool, said the opposition leader's office had a very busy week when the plagiarism occurred, and that there was nothing more to it than Mr. Lippert's error in judgment.
“My recollection was it was a very busy week for speeches,” Mr. Boessenkool said. “I'm not excusing what happened, but these things do happen.”
Hansard, the official record of the House of Commons, shows Mr. Harper made only one speech in the House of Commons that week in addition to attending Question Period.
Mr. Lippert is an expert in intellectual property – a field that includes such things as patents, trademarks and copyrights. He took a leave of absence from his job as senior policy analyst for International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda to work in the Conservative “war room” in Ottawa.
After earning a Ph.D. in modern European history from the University of Notre Dame, he worked as managing editor for the Asia and World Institute in Taiwan, according to online biographies. He returned to Canada in 1984 to work as a caucus researcher for British Columbia's Social Credit government and then as a policy analyst for the premier's office until 1991.
He was Kim Campbell's press secretary when she was the federal justice minister and was an adviser to her campaign for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party. He has also taught at Carleton University and the University of British Columbia, was a senior policy analyst at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, and wrote editorials for The Globe and Mail for a short time in 1996.
Many of the lines of Mr. Howard's speech were also used in editorials Mr. Harper submitted to newspapers such as the Toronto Star, National Post and Ottawa Citizen.
Week 4 of the campaign
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