Excuses, excuses

Not surprisingly, the Cons are now having to retract their false claim that it was NATO (and not Deceivin' Stephen) who decided to uninvite opposition defence critics from the upcoming Bucharest summit. But the new explanation only invites more questions about what the Cons' strategy was to begin with:

The Star reported yesterday that Defence Minister Peter MacKay's office had invited opposition critics to go to Bucharest April 2-4, then rescinded the offer 24 hours later, saying, "NATO officials reduced the number of Canadian officials that ... will be allowed to accompany our minister."

Following inquiries to MacKay's office, director of operations Paul J. Throop sent another note to opposition parties "to clarify" why defence critics had been uninvited.

"I wanted to convey to you our directive on the NATO meeting that we do not require pairing, not that it was a NATO directive. Sorry for the confusion," Throop wrote in an email Wednesday.

Pairing is the parliamentary custom of matching a travelling government MP to an opposition member so that no one party is disadvantaged in the event of a vote in the House of Commons.

Now, it's embarrassing enough that the Cons seem to consider being caught in a lie as "confusion". But consider what the Cons' current message suggests about their reason for inviting the opposition parties.

After all, there's no particular reason why a pairing arrangement requires that opposition MPs be flown out of the country. Indeed, the same process is frequently followed by agreement between the parties when MPs aren't able to attend a vote.

But if one takes the Cons at face value, then they were originally willing to offer opposition critics a place in the Bucharest delegation - at public expense - solely for the purpose of getting them out of the House of Commons. And that's only made all the worse by the Cons now reversing course after apparently deciding they don't want any inconvenient reality coming from the Canadian delegation.

Needless to say, it doesn't look like the latest excuse will be the last one. But regardless of what explanation the Cons eventually settle on, the ultimate question once again is how anybody - whether reporter, pundit or mere observer - could justify believing a word from the Cons in the face of yet another set of contradictory and nonsensical excuses in the making.