A look at some Globe & Mail endorsements over the years. I must stress that these are actual editorials, about the candidates they are endorsing. This is not satire.

2011 – Stephen Harper: That is the great strike against the Conservatives: a disrespect for Parliament, the abuse of prorogation, the repeated attempts (including during this campaign) to stanch debate and free expression. It is a disappointing failing in a leader who previously emerged from a populist movement that fought so valiantly for democratic reforms.

2004 – Paul Martin: Therefore, we urge a Liberal vote Monday — not because they’ve earned the right to re-election but because, at the very least, we can count on them to do little harm and, at best, the near-death experience might help the old Paul Martin find himself and lead Canada more confidently into the future.

2000 – Jean Chretien: Mr. Chrétien has to go. He has become a one-man band, loving power for its own sake (witness his premature election call), terrorizing backbench MPs who might seek an independent voice when confidence isn’t at stake, shrugging off the sloppy record-keeping and politically charged grants of Human Resources Development, dismissing the ethical problems of his intercession with the Federal Business Development Bank, and in general treating his position as lord of a fief rather than as a public trust.

1993 – Jean Chretien: After nine years in opposition, they offer a program best described as Bourbon economics: they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. As the supreme example of the party’s “new thinking,” the Liberal jobs plan – public works spending, 1930s-style – is an embarrassing fraud. Worse, it is clear that a majority Liberal government would make no serious attempt to rescue the nation’s finances. Indeed, it’s a safe bet the Liberals would not get the deficit below $30-billion.

1965 – John Diefenbaker: John Diefenbaker squandered his unprecedented opportunities, increasingly clasping authority to himself and doing nothing with it until the pressure of events left him no room to manoeuvre, no time to explain the decisions he was forced to take, almost no friends to defend him.