The recent news about Stephen Harper using the same speech that Australian Prime Minister John Howard used to argue in favour of joining the U.S in its war on Iraq has caused a bit of a stir in this election campaign. But maybe he just plagiarized the wrong speech. That's the argument Mike Buckthought makes in the Toronto Star.

For example, Mr. Buckthought writes: "Canadians would be pleasantly surprised if he copied a speech by David Cameron, leader of Britain's opposition Conservative party. Harper would say, ‘Since becoming leader of the Conservative party I have sought to push the environment up to the top of the political agenda.'"

Oh, and for the record, we disagree with those right-tilting pundits who have said this instance of plagiarism is no big deal (imagine any journalist arguing that plagiarism isn't a big deal!) because Stéphane Dion copied some pages from a report put out by the David Suzuki Foundation. We made that report available to all the political parties with the hope that they would adopt it!