At least one answer

Predictably, Stephen Harper's Google interview was just as free of any substantive content as his answers in any other forum. But the surrounding reporting is starting to set up a useful timeline on the preferential treatment given to the Cons by Google:

Dimitri Soudas, Mr. Harper's press secretary, said officials from Google, which owns the site, approached with the offer about a month ago.

“It didn't take us long to say, ‘this is great,'” he said Tuesday. Indeed it is, if you're a politician.

Compare that to CBC's report on Google's interactions with the NDP:

We met with two representatives from Google a few weeks ago - no members of other parties were present. They pitched us on the live streaming technology that Google's American arm used for President Obama's State of the Union and which Prime Minister Harper took advantage of today.

At the time, they said that the infrastructure to support this stream was not yet available in Canada but gauged our interest in making use of it, if and when it was available.

From those passages, it looks like it was Google which approached Canada's political parties to offer its pitch for live-streaming to build on its use of the technology for the State of the Union address. And perhaps not surprisingly, Google apparently approached the Cons first - which isn't problematic from the standpoint of working their way down the list of Canada's parties based on seat totals.

But its message toward the NDP was different after it made its offer of an interview to the Cons - who, of course, would have been in a position to dictate whether or not Google received access to Harper comparable to what they received from Obama.

So the key question would seem to be, what caused Google to offer a different pitch to the NDP than it offered to Harper? And did the Cons set conditions on Google's access to Harper which resulted in its refusing to work with Canada's other political parties on the same terms offered to them?