"finished You"

Yeah that smells a little like bad news. Or good news, depending on which side of the aisle you're sitting.

In the end there will be some sort of pronouncement from the Chief Electoral Officer, who has the star wattage and household familiarity of the midnight-4am DJ on CBC Radio Two. I doubt the average Canadian will notice.

I have to say though there is something hilarious about a political party letting things get to this point. How many letters from Elections Canada went directly into the recycle bin without being opened?

I'm sorry, am I a bad person?

There's an ongoing war between Elections Canada and the CPC, the details of which I know nothing about, so it's not quite letters in the bin Chris.

"volume Romney"

I know there's an ongoing war, but if you're smart you play nice with the (<i>ahem</i>) non-partisan authorities while lodging your disagreement.

It is the difference between an innocent party yelling, kicking and screaming while the police place him under arrest, and saying calmly "I'll go with you, Constable, but you're arresting the wrong guy. Here's my alibi, which can be corroborated by such and such, when you get around to investigating it."

One guy gets his face mashed with the Mag-Lite for resisting arrest, and one does not. They are both wronged and inconvenienced, but the neighbourhood perception of the guy who goes along without a scene is going to be a lot different than that of the guy who got a faceful of concrete. The Tories could have saved themselves a load of embarassment just by cooperating. Like the notional neighbours, Joe Sixpack isn't going to recall that the Mounties were "merely" assisting. He is going to recall that the Mounties were <i>there</i>.

And that, like it or not, implies criminality.

So I dock them a bajillion points for needless PR stupidity.

Do some things just not look right to you sometimes?<blockquote class="smalltext">In what has become known as the "in and out" scheme, the Conservative Party transferred up to $50,000 to individual candidates who, in turn, gave the money back to the party for ads created at the national campaign headquarters. If the TV and radio ads in question were in fact national in nature, the cash-flushed Conservatives surpassed the $18.3-million legal election-spending limit by more $1.2-million.</blockquote>

We used to do the in and out thing with money with regard to paying for people to go to AGMs. Commonplace.

It doesn't look right, but apparently all of the parties do it. Steve Janke had examples from the Liberal and NDP parties months ago.

So yeah it is a ridiculous practice, but I also see how the Conservatives say that this is inconsistent application of the regulation, and I think they are correct in pointing that out.

But the way to do it would have been to publicise examples of the same conduct from the other parties and ask why they aren't being keelhauled in public, too.

This seems to be an example of a common theme with a certain class of neo-con that is shared, for example, with Mr. E. Levant whereby there is a need to do a hatchet job on your own reputation to point out the depths to which you have be brought. Sort of a duty to aggrevate one's own suffering rather than mitigate.