The resignation penalty, in other words, is to be applied not to those who break a major election promise, but only to those who also promise to resign if found to have broken that promise. Of course, this depends upon the breaker of the first promise discovering her integrity in time to keep the second. In Ms. Copps' case, it was a near thing.

The Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, you will recall, at first maintained that neither she nor her party had broken their word over the GST, since the tax had been "replaced," as promised in the Red Book of Liberal promises. (This is a curious yardstick, since most of these have already been broken without anyone resigning or even promising to.)

In which case, she had no need also to say, as say she did, that the promise to resign if the promise to abolish was not kept was merely "a mistake," a slip of the campaign tongue, since the promise to abolish was indeed kept, or at least replaced. If, on the other hand, she was now forced to break the promise to resign, it could only be because the promise to abolish had also been broken.

But now Ms. Copps has resigned, thereby keeping one promise, although not the other, all the while breaking a third: the promise - okay, vow - not to resign. As the Prime Minister wrote in his letter accepting her resignation, "this is what integrity in politics is all about."

Ms. Copps will now run for re-election in her riding of Hamilton East. It is not clear to me what her platform will be. Will she run on her record - of broken promises? Or, in a bid to wipe the slate clean, will she make new promises, having publicly declared that not only these promises, but any promises she might make to back them up are merely campaign boilerplate, not to be taken seriously?

When she wins, she will be welcomed back into the Liberal caucus, not to say the cabinet, for having had the "integrity" to resign because the party broke its promise. Meanwhile, Mr. Nunziata will remain in exile, for having had the temerity to protest because the party broke its promise. Mr. Nunziata, in Liberal circles, is thought to be a man without honour.

Elsewhere, however, he is hailed as a man of principle. For where the Prime Minister, like Ms. Copps, insists the party did not break its promise to abolish the tax because it kept its promise to replace the tax, and where the Finance Minister maintains that if it broke its promise to replace the tax, it was only because it made a "mistake" - there's that word again - in believing that it could, Mr. Nunziata insists today, as he insisted before, that the tax should be abolished.

Now there are those who maintain that the party could not have been mistaken in thinking it could replace the tax, since all of the evidence that led it to conclude, after the election, that it could not was equally available before the election. The implication is that not only was the party lying when it said it could replace the tax, but it is lying now when it says it truly thought it could.

With Mr. Nunziata, the man of principle, things are not so clear. Given that he was among those most adamant before the election that the tax should be abolished, was this because he was genuinely mistaken? Or did he, like his party, know full well that the tax could not be abolished, and yet said it could? In other words, is he as culpable as the party he now accuses?

When he insists, with principled consistency, that the party should keep its promise to abolish the tax, is he still merely mistaken? Or is he principled only in sticking to the lie the rest of the party now disowns? Which is worse: the party that breaks a promise it admits it could never have kept, or the man who would hold the party to the promise in the pretence that it could?

And what of the Prime Minister? Although he now claims the party did not break its promise, we are told by the usual sources that, unlike Mr. Nunziata and Ms. Copps, he was against ever making the promise in the first place - on principle. Was he wrong, then, to have made a promise in which he did not believe? Or - help me out here - was he right that it was wrong?