Prime Minister Stephen Harper doesn't seem quite as smug this Saturday as say he has on any day over the past two weeks.
There's a new affidavit in the old Mulroney-Airbus scandal and this time it mentions Harper. There's a letter to harper from Karlheinz Schrieber, the man at the centre of the allegations.
All this has the prime Minister appointing an independent review of the allegations, essentially something far short of the public inquiry needed but still far from Harper's insistence that it would be dangerous to investigate allegations involving a former administration or prime minister.
Volte-face, the Globe calls it pretentiously.
Most of us would say about-face, or if you are from Newfoundland and Labrador, you'd know the political flip-flops all too well from watching Harper's provincialist doppelganger.
Such is its magnitude that even the National Post couldn't ignore the change-in-direction story, although the coverage has a noticeably different tone to the Globe work.
Catch video of the Prime Minister's news conference at ctv.ca.
Note one really interesting thing toward the end of harper's remarks in English: Harper says that Mulroney never spoke to him "on behalf of" Schreiber nor presented documents from Schreiber. he didn't deny in his own statement that former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had never discussed the Schreiber allegations and the entire affair with the current prime minister.
In a carefully crafted statement that said the same thing in French as in English, those particularly carefully chosen words might turn out to the the pivot on which the whole affair turns.
Expect the federal Conservatives to back off their election provocation pretty quickly.
-srbp-
