It seems to happen with amazing regularity.
Every time the Conservatives start inching towards the possibility of a majority government, something happens within their own ranks.
Just look at this week. Two public opinion polls showed support for Stephen Harper's Conservatives edging into the 40 per cent range, which is what is usually needed to secure a majority in this country.
More importantly, they showed voter support for Michael Ignatieff's Liberals sliding to 24 per cent, four points lower than the party had in the 2008 election under then leader Stéphane Dion.
With a budget coming, ostensibly on March 22, along with its two confidence votes, it would not seem to be too difficult for a party as wily as the Conservatives to have themselves defeated while blaming the opposition for forcing an election
They would then hope to capitalize on the momentum they have been building in the polls to help them cross the line into political utopia.
But then along came Bev Oda and the memo.
Kairos
A personal disclaimer here. I like Bev Oda. I have always found her easy to deal with, perhaps because her late husband gave me my first job in network television at CTV many years ago.
Bev Oda, fielding questions in the Commons on Feb. 17, 2011. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)
Having said that, mind you, I have to ask: What was she thinking!
Or was she not thinking?
In case you have been in a cave somewhere these past several days, let me recap: Last fall two officials at the Canadian International Development Agency, which Oda oversees, recommended in a memo that the Canadian government continue funding an organization call Kairos.
Kairos is a long-standing church-sponsored organization that works in Third World countries, and part of the money it uses for its projects comes from CIDA, and has for the past 35 years.
Well, make that came from CIDA. That is because, despite a CIDA memo recommending the funding be continued, someone clumsily wrote in what appears to be ballpoint ink the word NOT in front of the typed word recommended.
When first challenged in front of a parliamentary committee about the insertion, Oda said she didn't know who had inserted the NOT, changing the recommendation.
She wasn't unduly concerned, she said at the time, because she agreed the funding should be stopped.
Fast forward to this week. Under pressure Oda conceded that it was she who wrote in the word NOT.
And that has brought down a storm of opposition protest about being misled by the minister, which has sent Oda running for cover.
It also left Harper and Conservative House Leader John Baird to advance the spurious argument that, as the minister responsible, Oda did no wrong because the decision to cut the funding was the correct one.
No right
Frankly, I don't have enough detail about the appropriate distribution of aid money by CIDA to weigh in on that aspect of the argument.
But the Harper-Baird defence doesn't pass muster on a couple of levels.
What they are trying to get Canadians to swallow is a curious twist on the old adage that two wrongs don't make a right.
By their reasoning, if the funding decision on Kairos was right, it cancels out two wrongs.
They want Canadians to believe that reversing a recommendation in a memo signed by two senior public servants, without getting them to initial or otherwise acknowledge the change, is all right.
(Would either Harper or Baird feel that way if the situation was somehow reversed? I think even to ask the question here is to answer it.)
And what about misleading a parliamentary committee?
For someone in authority to lie or purposely mislead at any time is clearly wrong.
But in the House of Commons, which a parliamentary committee is by extension, it is as grave an offence as there can be. The whole system is based on "honourable" men and women going about the public's business.
Harper and Baird are trying to blow this off as though it is no big deal.
But you would think that, more than anyone, Conservatives would want to support and maintain the traditions and regulations of Parliament.
After all, it is abiding by the rules that is behind the party's law and order agenda, and so much else that they stand for.
Terribly rude
But we probably shouldn't be surprised by the behaviour of John Baird.
Think back to the end of November 2008 when the newly elected Conservatives tried to cancel, out of the blue, public funding for political parties, and the Liberals and NDP came together to plan a coalition alternative.
Harper was forced to go to Rideau Hall to ask then Governor General Michaëlle Jean to suspend Parliament for a time, to avoid the impending confidence vote he would surely have lost.
While he was there, Baird was stalking the foyer of the House of Commons threatening that if there was no prorogation, the Conservatives would "go over the heads of Parliament, go over the head of the Governor General" to get their way.
It was never entirely clear what he meant by that, other than perhaps hoping that bombast and time would help make the problem go away.
But once again it feels like the Conservatives are playing fast and loose with the conventions of an institution that should be above these kind of games.
In the process they are also ignoring that old limerick from the British Parliament at Westminster: "To lie in the nude isn't terribly rude, but to lie in the House is obscene!" What's more, it is an obscenity, I am sure, that will send those polls sliding out of majority territory.
