{"id":1942,"date":"2008-09-30T15:02:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-30T19:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=1942"},"modified":"2008-09-30T15:02:00","modified_gmt":"2008-09-30T19:02:00","slug":"harper-plagiarizes-liberals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=1942","title":{"rendered":"Harper Plagiarizes Liberals"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

Err…the Australian Liberals<\/a>, that is:<\/p>\n

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper plagiarized almost half of a speech he delivered in 2003 as opposition leader, Liberal candidate Bob Rae alleged on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Harper gave the speech in Parliament on March 20 — the first day U.S. forces began bombing Baghdad, and two days after then-Australian Prime Minister John Howard gave a strikingly similar address.<\/p>\n

At a news conference in Toronto on Tuesday morning, Rae played the speech by Harper simultaneously with a speech by then-Australian prime minister John Howard.<\/p>\n

Much of Harper’s address matches Howard’s virtually word for word.<\/p>\n

Rae released transcripts and videos of both speeches and suggested they serve as evidence that a vote for the Conservatives is akin to voting for a “Republican-Conservative” government.
<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

First off, kudos to the Liberal war room for digging this one up. A catch like this takes a lot more work than just googling a candidate’s name, so they deserve major props. My sense is that this isn’t going to turn into that big a deal, but my opinion on that may be clouded by the extreme indifference that greeted Ralph’s<\/a> bout with plagiarism in Alberta (and this was probably a speechwriter who messed up, rather than Harper himself).<\/p>\n

At the same time, bringing up Harper’s ever evolving memory of his Iraq position doesn’t hurt at all. And releasing an ad linking Harper to Bush<\/a> on the same day shows a bit of forethought on the Liberals’ part. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

UPDATE: <\/em><\/strong>And we’ve got our scapegoat<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Err…the Australian Liberals, that is: Conservative Leader Stephen Harper plagiarized almost half of a speech he delivered in 2003 as opposition leader, Liberal candidate Bob Rae alleged on Tuesday. Harper gave the speech in Parliament on March 20 — the first day U.S. forces began bombing Baghdad, and two days after then-Australian Prime Minister John […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}