Speaking of party over country...

The Cons add another glaring example to their ever-growing list of misuses of public resources, as ministerial offices have been ordered to drop everything else in order to provide the Conservative Party with issue responses and talking points:

To finalize its campaign preparations for the upcoming federal election, the Prime Minister's Office has instructed all the Cabinet minister's offices to put together binders pertaining to their portfolios, which outline anticipated opposition attacks during the course of the campaign and how to respond, Conservative sources told The Hill Times last week.

"All ministers' offices have been told to prepare binders for the campaign ... This is just summarizing all of the anticipated lines of criticism, what we've done, and so the people on the campaign have [all the material before the writ is dropped]. It's basically so that the people on the campaign, when something arises, they don't need to go to the minister's offices [for a response]. They want to have all the material on hand," a Conservative source told The Hill Times last week, adding that ministerial offices have been instructed to submit the information by this week.

It's obvious enough that the primary purpose of a federal department is supposed to be to actually take care of its public responsibilities - not to hand over information to the Cons for their use in an election. And it's just another signal of the Cons' belief that the federal government is nothing but a source of resources for their own party that they figure their own partisan interests come first even in offices which are dealing with issues like the food safety crisis.

But the problems with this particular action may not end with the blurring of lines between government business and Con party operations. Instead, it's also worth asking how departments may "anticipate" what attacks are expected and from whom.

Presumably, meeting the terms of the request would involve informing both the PMO (and in turn the Cons' party apparatus) of who's been asking what questions and reviewing what information. But that could only be seen as an even larger-scale version of the mini-scandal that emerged a couple of years ago when word came out that the Cons were sharing the names of Access to Information applicants among various departments. And the strong implication of this latest demand from Harper is that anybody who's asked questions or expressed concerns about the Cons will be catalogued within the Cons' party apparatus.

In other words, the Cons' latest attempt to turn the federal government to partisan ends doesn't only figure to result in their wrongfully using public resources, but also to serve as one of the key steps in the creation of the Cons' own internal enemies list. And the fact that the Cons are publicly gloating about that kind of step only offers another indication of why it's long past time to remove them from office.