Precedents choice

Everyone is quoting inappropriate precedents in the battle for Goodale's corpse. The Tories are passing around a list of federal and provincial ministers who resigned under criminal investigation -- but in every case, it was because they themselves were the subject of the investigation. The Liberals, for their part, have their own list: finance ministers (Michael Wilson, Marc Lalonde, et al) who did not resign after a budget leak. This is interesting, since a) it has not been definitively established that there was a leak, a point the Liberals had stressed until now, and b) at the time of the Wilson leak, the Liberals were quite sure that this did require the minister's resignation. But of course the real point is that the Wilson and Lalonde leaks were nothing like as serious as this one (if leak this was). Nobody made any money off them, and nobody lost money -- except, in Lalonde's case, the taxpayers: To forestall accusations that his deficit forecast of $32.4-billion (or whatever it was) had been leaked (after Lalonde, in a pre-budget photo-op, carelessly let the cameras get too near the document), the minister hastily tacked on $200 million in spending, boosting the deficit to $32.6-billion and allowing him to claim that the correct number had not, in fact, been leaked. If I were the Liberals, I'm not sure I'd be anxious to remind voters of that particular "precedent." ADDENDUM: There's a good history of budget secrecy and budget leaks here, including this nugget:

1983 – A Globe and Mail reporter finds documents thrown out by the Ontario Treasury Board. Treasurer Frank Miller offers to resign, but Premier William Davis says the situation is not serious enough to warrant it.