You don't mess with CP

The Liberal dirty tricks dept. gets caught, bigtime...

Anonymous tip on old speech leads back to Liberals:

... It began the day before the first televised leaders' debates in Vancouver, with the Liberals scrambling to change the channel following the already infamous "beer and popcorn" gaffe by communications director Scott Reid...

Alex Munter, a former Ottawa city councillor and well-known gay rights activist, helped set the ball in play.

Munter contacted a Canadian Press reporter travelling with the Conservative campaign offering up an old Harper speech that an acquaintance of his, as Munter put it, stumbled upon while browsing the Net.

The speech, delivered by Harper when he was a private citizen working for the National Citizens' Coalition, praised American conservative values, disparaged Canada as a "welfare state" and said the jobless aren't worried because they have generous benefits...

Munter asked to remain anonymous as the source of the tip. Contacted by CP's election desk, he also vigorously denied acting with any partisan direction.

After some deliberation, CP ran a story outlining the main speech points, citing the source of the tip simply as a political opponent of Harper. The story was immediately leapt upon by the Liberal war room as evidence the Conservative leader is outside mainstream Canadian opinion.

By the following day, the Liberals were sending out backgrounders under the following Editor's Note:

"A CP story yesterday highlighted a speech given by the Honourable Stephen Harper to the Council on National Policy."

That was about the same time that The Canadian Press learned that Munter was in Vancouver with the Liberal team, working with Martin on debate preparations.

Oh, but it gets worse. In the sense that it gets better:

Munter, contacted again Thursday, was repeatedly asked whether the Liberal party had any connection to his suggesting CP look for the story.

Each time, Munter evaded the question.

"I am not a card-carrying member of any political party," he said.

"The Liberal party was not a factor in my letting CP know about this story.

"I wasn't calling on behalf of the Liberal party, I was calling on my own and it was up to CP whether it ran the story or not."

Munter eventually offered that the speech was found by a friend "who is something of a whiz on the Internet."

He was asked if his friend had any connection with the Liberal war room. He said he didn't know, but finally conceded: "He is a Liberal."

On Sunday, Munter, who is a close friend of Brian Guest, one of Prime Minister Paul Martin's closest advisers, hedged when asked directly if Guest was the source of the tip.

"Nobody put me up to anything," said Munter. "I act on the basis of my convictions and nobody has ever manipulated me to do anything."

Read the whole thing. From the tone of the piece, CP is mightily steamed.

So let's see. They got caught plagiarizing one ad in Quebec, they passed off Liberal operatives as average Canadians in another, and now they're found to have been laundering their gotchas through a "non-partisan" activist. All in just the first three weeks. And that's the stuff we know about.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Of course, if CP hadn't been so willing to run with an anonymous source, the great disease of modern journalism -- it's not like he was a whistleblower afraid for his job -- they might have avoided being taken so spectacularly.

AFTERTHOUGHTER: Actually, CP's got some explaining to do as well. The news service says the original story described the anonymous Munter as "a political opponent," which would at least have given the reader some clue as to his motives. Only that's not the case. The story in fact describes the source as "an opponent of his social policies." You know, just a public-spirited policy wonk...