"Psst...  hey..   let me give you a lesson in ethics."

Well.

I hate to say, "I told you so," but now the government is facing much bigger headaches than they would have faced if they had just dealt with things in a direct way from the outset.

Jason Kenney's gaff is a non-issue.  That's the best response we've seen in some time from our Government.  "Sorry, it was a mistake" - done.

Would that they were willing to be as forthright regarding Bev Oda.

However, the interesting point is that the Liberals seem dead set on presenting a challenge to the Conservative government based upon the issue of "ethics".

Really?

Well.  Just a little reminder of the greatest ethical lapse in our lifetime:

The Spornsorship Scandal - Adscam.

Ironically enough, the ruling yesterday on contempt came from Peter Milliken who was part of the big red machine who grossly betrayed the trust of Canadians by actually stealing money from the government to give to their friends.  Milliken has been a Liberal MP since 1988 - and has been speaker since 2001 - after the sponsorship scandal came to a head in 2000.

So.

Under Milliken's watch, under his leader, Jean Chretien's watch - the Liberal Party of Canada fleeced Canadians of the sum of perhaps $200 million dollars, giving the money to their good friends, and perhaps just as damaging to our country, serving to solidify and in fact increase separatist sentiment and lack of trust in Government in the Province of Quebec.

Under Milliken's watch, under his leader, Jean Chretien's watch - there were criminal offenses committed and people were put in jail:

In May 2005, Paul Coffin – the first person to face charges in the scandal – pleaded guilty to 15 counts of fraud. He was later sentenced to two-years-less-a-day to be served in the community. By the time of his sentencing, he had repaid more than $1 million of the $1.5 million he had been accused of taking. However, the Quebec Court of Appeal eventually overturned his conditional sentence and ordered Coffin to spend 18 months in jail.

On Sept. 21, 2005, Chuck Guité and Jean Brault pleaded not guilty to six charges of fraud.

But, on March 2, 2006, Brault changed his tone and pleaded guilty to five of six fraud-related charges, leaving the charge of conspiracy. The former head of Groupaction Marketing admitted to paying salaries to Liberal party workers who never did any work for his company. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison, and was granted a full parole after five months. Brault will later go to trial for the conspiracy charge.

Guité, however, headed to trial on five fraud-related charges involving a total of $1.5 million. In late March, he told a judge he couldn’t afford a lawyer, and he represented himself when he went into a Montreal court on May 5, 2006. The court heard that he authorized more than $2 million in contracts to Brault's Groupaction Marketing Inc. without proper competition. And, testimony revealed he also doubled the value of one contract to $500,000 without demanding any additional work. On June 6, 2006, Guité was convicted of all five charges.

On June 19, 2006, Guité was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison.

So.

Let's have an election on the issue of "ethics".

Let's accept the ruling of the Speaker, do a mea culpa, and then proceed to fight the election on the performance of the Canadian economy, and, when discussion of ethics arise, suggest that we enter into a frank and broad discussion of who truly has a track record of the grossest abuse of ethical principals in our lifetime.

A party whose members themselves have described as creating a "culture of corruption".

The Liberals, I might suggest, in seeking to make "ethics" their platform of choice are making yet one more, in a series, of massive blunders in making their party less and less relevant to Canadians every day.