Bouquets of Gray (run by the blogger who ran Buckets of Grewal, and who was noted for his analysis of that tape of Gurmant Grewal and the discovery that it had been doctored) and Jerad Gallinger over at his site have found another apparent instance of Harper and/or his speech writers heavily copying from someone else - and this time they liked the guy’s stuff so much, they copied it from TWO separate essays and rolled it into one Harper speech:
Buckets explains this side-by-side comparison:
To the right is a section of his (Harper) speech on the Canadian Wheat Board (Nov. 6, 2002); it copies sections from two essays by Craig Docksteader of The Prairie Policy Centre, a rightwing think tank. (One written in 1998 with the Harper-parallels in yellow, and one in 2002, green).
In the first instance of plagiarism that was discovered in Harper’s involving his support for the Iraq war that copied Australian PM John Howard’s address, one of Harper’s former staffers took the fall. In the 2nd instance, where it was found that parts of former Ontario premier Mike Harris’s speech had been lifted, no staffer was blamed, but Harper dismissed that as being “boilerplate” phrases that are used all of the time and which he merely reused in his opinion.
Now we have this long speech that is a lot more then “mere boilerplate” - it appears to be wholesale copying. What explanation does Harper have for this? What does this say about Harper? And what about the consequences? Current Vice-Presidential candidate Joe Biden had his presidential run in 1988 scuppered by a revelation that he had lifted phrases and used them in a campaign speech, so the Conservative defenders cannot be so quick to try and brush this off, as I’ve seen some try to do.
As j-rad says:
Reporters have been fired and students expelled for less egregious cases of copying. Whether the Prime Minister will hold himself to the same standard as a second-year English major remains to be seen.
Harper will not fire himself - but the Canadian electorate can do so.
Harper is a dud.