For someone like who has had a tough time staying up-to-date over the past few days, Don Martin's column today was a perfect refresher.
There was the mole.
...The wheels fell off on final approach into Calgary late Wednesday night. As the Hamilton-bound Liberal campaign plane swooped over the foothills for a jet fuel fill-up, media BlackBerrys vibrated to life with word a major party policy leak had hit the newswire.
The apology that wasn't supposed to happen.
...As we taxied for takeoff, word surfaced that Martin had echoed Conservative leader Stephen Harper's earlier-in-the-day apology to Chinese Canadians for the head tax charged Asian immigrants in the late 19th century. It was done quietly, in an ethnic television interview that didn't appear on Martin's itinerary and was of considerable surprise given his own minister on the file had repeatedly refused to say he was sorry, warning an apology would open the door to compensation claims
Off message Liberals.
...Bad news officially became a trend when, minutes into the air, another BlackBerry message flashed the story that Liberal turncoat Keith Martin, a former Canadian Alliance MP, had refused to attend the party's health care policy announcement, citing his embrace of a two-tier health system for going AWOL. This suggests Martin (Paul) was fibbing when he blamed the missing Martin (Keith) on a "conflict of schedules."
Meanwhile, newspapers were thundering off the presses in Quebec, where star Liberal recruit Marc Garneau, the former astronaut, had compared any rush toward Quebec separatism to the American invasion of Baghdad, both being poorly thought-out wars. These are the comments of a political space cadet, if you ask me, which may cost him what was supposed to be a safe seat.
And just to complete the circle of candidate chaos, Justice Minister Irwin Cotler was in Toronto on Wednesday campaigning against mandatory minimums for gun crimes, even though his own department had put them in legislation as a concept endorsed by his leader.
And the quote of the day.
...The problem is best described by a diehard Montreal Liberal who put it this way: "We have a dilemma: We can't find a good reason to vote for the Liberals. And we can't find a reason to vote against the Conservatives."
A fine piece of work.
