I know the Conservatives are trying to cut unemployment. And I know there aren’t a lot of job openings for “separatist politician” these days. But I’m not sure if a former PQ Cabinet Minister was the best person for Michael Fortier to hire to look into Liberal polling contracts.

You see, optics is everything. And the optics of having a separatist decide if an embarrassing judicial inquiry into Liberal polling practices is necessary, might lead the casual observer to think this is pretty much a good old fashioned witch hunt (“Are you now or have you ever been a member of Earnscliffe?”). And if the said inquiry head doesn’t even know the name of the auditor general at his first press conference, the casual observer might think he’s not exactly the most qualified man for the job.

That’s not to say that it isn’t worth looking into this. After all, public tax dollars should never be spent on partisan polls. I think we can all agree that public tax dollars should only be spent on non-partisan things (like, investigating your predecessors‘ polling practices or taking out ads against Danny Williams).

UPDATE: Oops…

Liz Thompson over at The Gazette did better than dozens of staffers at the Liberal Research Bureau, none of whom managed to dig up this fact about Daniel Paillé, the Tories’ new pay-for-play separatist Earnscliffe-slayer, which everal reporters
discovered yesterday after 3 minutes on the Google machine:

[…]

In short, this is the worst example of vetting in Canadian politics since somebody hired Jean-Daniel Lafond’s wife. This guy Michael Fortier’s turning out to be a real 40-watter, ain’t he?