“A speech from five years, two elections, three Parliaments ago, from a party that no longer exists …”

First response from the Little Shop of Hey, Why Don’t We Go Back To Talking About The Carbon Tax? Wasn’t That Fun?:

[…]Conservative spokesman Yaroslav Baran told The Globe and Mail that Mr. Rae’s “attack” is evidence of Liberal desperation.

“This is exactly why the Liberals are in the trouble they’re in, as a party and as a campaign,” Mr. Baran said Tuesday. “They want to focus on a speech from five years, two elections, three Parliaments ago, from a party that no longer exists.

Mr. Baran said the major issue on the minds of Canadians is the economy, and the Liberals should be focusing on that.

The fact the Liberals are making this accusation is evidence of their weak campaign and leadership, Mr. Baran said.

“We’re not going to get drawn into which staffer wrote which speech five years ago,” he said. “This is nothing but desperation from the Liberal campaign, and it’s completely irrelevant to the real concerns of voters in this election.”

Except — wait, remind me. Who was it who gave the speech? The leader of that party that no longer exists? Who began his response to what he described as a “historic” motion with the following words:

“Mr Speaker, I stand today to speak to a matter of the gravest importance that Parliament can address: the matter of war and specifically the resumption of war against the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

Seems to me that, at the time, the leader of the-party-that-no-longer-exists thought it was a pretty important speech indeed, although according to Baran, not important enough to, you know, write himself – despite and his conviction that the government had “betrayed Canada’s history and its values” by failing to join the coalition. Not to mention the fact that, despite his admiration for the now-former Australian PM, he apparently never bothered to read what John Howard had said in defence of his decision to send troops into Iraq, or he would surely have recognized the same words that he himself delivered just two days later.

(More from Wells here.)