Cheap shot of the day

This one is just nasty:

While some frontbench members of the Liberal Party were canvassing kindergarten classes, shaking down young children for campaign donations, this team was hard at work providing good government to this country.

This was Treasury Board President John Baird speaking on an unrelated matter in the house, as reported in this article on Joe Volpe's campaign contributions.

Later in the same article, the authors seem to forget who's who in the political landscape:

Volpe insisted that his donors are "all behaving as individuals . . . There's no participation by any company."

But Martin was skeptical.

"It's almost as if there is some collective unconscious here that all of the Apotex executives woke up one morning and all decided to give the maximum amount of money to one leadership candidate. We want that investigated."

The Harper government is already proposing to tighten restrictions on donations as part of its new Accountability Act.

Martin said he will put forward amendments aimed at ensuring large loans to leadership candidates don't become de facto corporate contributions and requiring any donations from children to be deducted from their parents' donation limit.

The "Martin" quoted above is (for non-Canadians in the audience) the former prime minister Paul Martin. He's not otherwise identified in the article. He's quoted as if he still held some position of influence, but he's just a member of the house, not leader of the opposition.

Hat tip to Elizabeth for forwarding the original URL.