More fabrications

Two days after the Cons' convention funding scandal went public, Harper and company aren't getting any more plausible in their excuses, relying now on a patently false "everybody does it" defence:

The Conservative party's legal counsel, Paul Lepsoe, said that since "time immemorial" delegate fees have only been considered donations when a convention turns a profit.

"If there is a portion that is a contribution, in other words that exceeds the cost of the event, that portion constitutes a political contribution for which a receipt should be issued," he told The Canadian Press earlier this week.

"That's longstanding practice that everyone follows, including the Conservative party."

So who does "everybody" include? Well, none of the national parties besides the Cons which have won seats in Parliament since something reasonably approximating time immemorial:

But it wasn't a longstanding practice for the NDP, Liberals or the predecessors of the Conservative party...

(F)ormer officials from both the Progressive Conservative party and the Canadian Alliance, the parties that created the Conservative party, said the common practice they followed was to disclose convention fees paid by their members as political donations.

"I'm absolutely positive we always gave out political receipts, minus the amount paid for meals, but everything else was always treated as a political donation," said Bruck Easton, former president of the Progressive Conservative party who later ran unsuccessfully as a Liberal. "That was quite frankly an important part of getting people to our convention."

His account is backed by financial records submitted to Elections Canada.

Rick Anderson, a top organizer and executive member of both the Reform Party and its successor, the Canadian Alliance, said his recollection is that both parties followed the same practice as the Liberals and NDP.

"My memory is that everybody one way or another wrote a cheque out to the party and got a receipt for it," Anderson said.

Suffice it today that today's batch of lies isn't any more believable than yesterday's. Apparently the Cons' new idea of transparent government is to try to use transparently obvious lies to defend their questionable practices. But it shouldn't take long for voters to let Harper and company know that's not quite what they had in mind when they voted for what was supposed to be a cleaner government.

Update: Somena Media has more about the Cons' deflection tactics.