"Pirates didn't bury their treasure that carefully"

Heather Scoffield and Jennifer Ditchburn lay out the litany of lies propelled on the country by the Harper Conservatives over the census long form and underscore a simple fact:

From the PMO to the Treasury Board, with Harper controlling the entire process, everyone in government political circles was very aware of how wrong the decision was and how much irreparable damage would be done. Otherwise they would have no need to bury the evidence their handiwork.

They behave like criminals, hiding behind lies, inventing stories and attempting to divert attention from their actions.

Then they send in the greatest fabricator of all - Stockwell Day. Having called a press conference to discuss his party's "Economic Action Plan", Day found himself ambushed by reporters who are increasingly aware that when a Harper cabinet minister speaks to the census decision, a lie will be issued forth.

There is a simple point here: If the Harper government truly believes that what they are doing is correct and that the Canadian public agrees, they would not have to employ odious characters like Dimitri Soudas to invent outrageous scenarios of home-invading census workers; they would not have to send senior members of cabinet out into the public armed with easily rebutted falsehoods and; they wouldn't have to resort to the likes of Stockwell Day, (an individual who is truth-challenged at the best of times), to babble on idiotically, spewing bovine scatology on virtually any subject he is presented.

The Treasury Board President also faced questions about the Conservative government’s commitment to cutting the deficit while spending billions of dollars on new prisons while the crime rate is, in fact, declining.

Mr. Day doesn’t buy the view that crime rates are declining. Rather, he maintains crime is going unreported in Canada at “alarming” rates.

Based on what?!! The statement was so ludicrous that it got up the nose of Sun Media's (a Harper friendly organ) David Aikin, who decided it was time to put Day's claim to the test.

“I will follow up on that because I am baffled,” Sun Media’s Ottawa bureau chief David Akin said. “There is a statistic about unreported crimes? I mean if they are not reported by definition we have no idea about these crimes.

“You are just not making sense or I may be just a dolt and I don’t understand. Help me out on this one.”

Which pushed Day further into the pile of manure he had just dumped on the lectern.

In response, Mr. Day made vague comments about bankcard theft, fraud, home invasions and identity theft. And he promised to send Mr. Akin some statistics.

We'll be watching closely to see where and how those "statistics" were acquired. But more importantly, I'm calling absolute bullshit on Day right now. Does he really believe that someone who has suffered a bankcard theft would leave that unreported? Would you let a home invasion go without reporting it to the police? Identity theft is a massive unreported crime?

Is Day right out of his mind?!

A police investigator acquaintance told me recently that Harper's crew regularly exhibit all the signs of a criminal trying to evade justice and that if he had someone like Day, alone in an interview room for 30 minutes, he would have him confessing the truth and crying for his Mommy. They're that bad at covering their tracks.