Plagiarism allegations plague Harper

Published on Friday October 03, 2008
Martin O’Hanlon
THE CANADIAN PRESS

OTTAWA–First it was embarrassing revelations of Aussie plagiarism. Now Stephen Harper is facing allegations of Canuck copying.

This time it’s for allegedly lifting part of a speech by former Ontario premier – and fellow Conservative – Mike Harris.

The Liberals sent out a news release Friday comparing lines from a speech Harris gave in December 2002 with an address by Harper in February 2003. Three sentences are nearly identical.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that large parts of a speech Harper gave as Opposition leader in 2003 – urging Canada to join the war in Iraq – were taken from an address by then-Australian prime minister John Howard.

That resulted in horrible headlines around the world, especially Down Under.

Speechwriter Owen Lippert was forced to resign after admitting he plagiarized Howard, but he insisted Harper knew nothing about it.

The scale of the alleged intellectual theft in the Harper-Harris case is much smaller. But, as many a journalist has learned, there’s no word limit on plagiarism.

In a speech to the Montreal Economic Institute on Dec. 4, 2002, Harris said, according to speaking notes:

“Thinking about things from a new and different perspective is never easy. It takes courage, conviction and the strength to know that in taking a new and innovative course, you are making change for the better. … Genuine leaders are the ones who do the right thing.”

Two months later, in an address to the House of Commons on Feb. 19, 2003, Harper said:

“Thinking about things from a new and different perspective is not about reading the polls and having focus group tests. It is never easy because it takes courage, conviction and the strength to know that taking a new and innovative course is going to make change for the better. Genuine leaders are the ones who do the right thing.”

In an ironic twist, Harper’s speech also praised Harris.

Liberal candidate David McGuinty said it’s an example of Harper’s “lack of intellectual honesty, of any original thought.”

“It’s time for the prime minister to take responsibility for his repeated plagiarism, for passing off the thoughts and words of others as his own. Or perhaps he’ll simply find another junior speech writer to fire.”

Conservative spokesman Dan Dugas dismissed the matter as an attempt by the Liberals to “deflect attention from their lack of an economic plan.”

“It’s a stretch to say it’s the same as the Howard speech, which concerned us and which we took seriously,” he said.

“Here, they’ve identified 44 words out of a 4,956-word speech that are similar – not identical – to a speech by another conservative.”

However, Dugas refused to say who wrote the speech.

The Conservatives also initially tried to brush off the controversy over the Howard plagiarism, but were forced to do an abrupt about-face and announce Lippert’s resignation.

source: www.thestar.com/federalelection/article/511503

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Tory strategist plagiarism ‘scapegoat,’ say NDP, Liberals

The Edmonton Journal October 1, 2008

OTTAWA – The Liberals and NDP said the Conservative staffer who resigned Tuesday for plagiarizing parts of Stephen Harper’s 2003 parliamentary speech on the Iraq war was a “scapegoat” for the prime minister.

Owen Lippert, a Conservative war room strategist, abruptly resigned Tuesday afternoon, three hours after a senior Harper strategist in a conference call with dozens of journalists about the matter branded the issue a desperate attempt by the Liberals to deflect attention from a sagging campaign.

The Conservatives later dispatched a former member of Harper’s old Canadian Alliance opposition leader’s office, Ken Boessenkool, to tell journalists that neither he nor Harper had any idea Lippert had lifted parts of his March 20, 2003, speech to Parliament from a similar address by then-prime minister of Australia John Howard two days earlier.

Harper’s speech supported the U.S.-led war in Iraq, which began that day, contrasting with then-prime minister Jean Chretien, who refused to support it.

Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae started Tuesday’s chain of events in a speech that heralded Chretien’s decision and showing a split-screen video that played parts of Harper’s and Howard’s addresses that used identical language.

“It wasn’t Mr. Harper’s speech. It was a speech of former Australian prime minister John Howard that Mr. Howard delivered two days earlier,” Rae told his Toronto audience. “How can Canadians trust anything that Mr. Harper says now?”

The plagiarism allegation made front-page news in Australia on Wednesday after being picked up on CNN in the United States, something Rae said likely led the Conservatives to point the finger at Lippert. “The speed with which they found a sacrificial lamb is almost amazing,” Rae told Canwest News Service.

The Conservatives released a statement in which Lippert said he was “pressed for time,” and “overzealous in copying segments of another world leader’s speech.”

Lippert, who holds a PhD in European history, worked at the Fraser Institute, a right-wing economic think-tank, where he wrote research papers and books, including one on intellectual property, directly related to the question of plagiarism.
© (c) CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.

source: http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/decisioncanada/story.html?id=2f140a40-4dd5-40a6-99a7-65405d9b066b

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Harper speech plagiarized; Tory staffer resigns

CTV.ca News Staff
Published Tuesday, Sep. 30, 2008 7:39PM EDT

A campaign worker for the Conservatives has resigned, after the Liberals showed a 2003 speech by Stephen Harper that plagiarized sections of an address by then-Australian prime minister John Howard.

“In 2003, I worked in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition. I was tasked with — and wrote — a speech for the then Leader of the Opposition,” Owen Lippert said in a press release issued Tuesday. “Pressed for time, I was overzealous in copying segments of another world leader’s speech. Neither my superiors in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition nor the Leader of the Opposition was aware that I had done so.”

Lippert, who also became a senior policy advisor for the Canadian International Development Agency in 2008, apologized to “all involved.”

Just hours before Lippert’s resignation, Liberal candidate Bob Rae accused Harper of plagiarizing almost half of Howard’s speech, when Harper was opposition leader of the Canadian Alliance

At a press conference, Rae showed video of Harper giving a speech in Parliament on March 20, 2003 — the first day U.S. forces began bombing Baghdad.

The video is contrasted with a speech two days earlier from Howard, in which he gives a strikingly similar address.

Much of Harper’s address matches Howard’s virtually word-for-word.

Rae released transcripts and videos of both speeches and suggested they serve as evidence that a vote for the Conservatives is akin to voting for a “Republican-Conservative” government.

“This is a disgraceful performance by the leader of a political party there for all the world to see, and all the world is going to see it. They need to see it because they need to know what we’re dealing with here,” Rae told CTV Newsnet.

“I would say 35 to 40 per cent of the speech is the same, word for word, statement for statement, paragraph for paragraph, as the speech that was given a day and a half earlier by Mr. Howard.”

Meanwhile, the Tories are dismissing the allegations saying the “speech was given by a person who was leading a party that doesn’t exist anymore,” CTV’s Graham Richardson reported Tuesday.

Richardson, discussing what was discussed in a conference call Tuesday with the Tories, said the party has no explanation for where the speech came from.

Tory officials said there’s been a 100 per cent staff turnover since the speech, suggesting they don’t know the source, said Richardson.

They’re also saying they won’t answer the question because it’s “irrelevant,” he said.

The Tories further dismissed suggestions that Harper received talking points from the Republicans in the U.S.

Rae, the Liberal foreign affairs critic, said the revelation raises questions about whether Harper’s foreign policy views can be trusted.

“On this critical issue, on this issue on the world stage, this is a man who chose to parrot and to mimic and beg, borrow, steal someone else’s voice,” Rae said.

He added: “In law and journalism, in politics, if we can’t speak with an authentic voice, who the hell are we?”

Rae said even Harper’s opponents at the time acknowledged that the speech was eloquent. But he questioned how Harper could have dealt with such an important issue, using someone else’s words.

“He made that choice so blindly and carelessly that he ended up delivering a word-for-word repetition of someone else’s words and thoughts,” Rae said.

CTV’s Roger Smith called the revelations “the Liberal play of the day, the Hail Mary” designed to hurt the Conservatives’ election campaign.

“The Liberals are using this to show that Stephen Harper is totally in lockstep with the coalition of the willing, with George Bush and his Australian allies on the war in Iraq and that his foreign policy is copycat policy of Washington,” Smith said.

“Bob Rae went on to say Stephen Harper would have been expelled from high school for plagiarism.”

source: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080929/election2008_speech_080930?s_name=election2008&no_ads=587

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Harper’s 2003 Commons address mirrors Australian PM’s speech, Rae says

CBC News } Tuesday, September 30, 2008 | 5:04 PM ET
Comments 1005 Recommend 426

A staff member has apologized for plagiarizing a speech read by Stephen Harper in a 2003 address in the House of Commons as leader of the Opposition.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard, left, is seen on a television screen addressing the Australian Parliament in March 2003, alongside an image of Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, right, speaking two days later. (CBC)”Pressed for time, I was overzealous in copying segments of another world leader’s speech,” Owen Lippert says in a news release sent out by the Conservative camp on Tuesday afternoon.

“Neither my superiors in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition nor the leader of the Opposition was aware that I had done so.”

Lippert worked for Harper, then leader of the Canadian Alliance, when the speech calling for Canadian troops to be deployed to Iraq was written.

Lippert, a former policy analyst for economic think-tank the Fraser Institute, has announced his resignation from his current position working in the Conservative campaign headquarters.

The apology came hours after Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae accused Harper of plagiarizing from the Howard speech.
Tory camp dismisses issue as irrelevant

At a campaign appearance in Toronto in the morning, Rae played video showing Howard speaking to the Australian Parliament on March 18, 2003, alongside video of an address by Harper two days later in Ottawa.

The two speeches, which the Liberals posted to their website, appear to have lengthy duplicate passages, according to a comparison of the two parliaments’ Hansard transcripts.

Earlier in the day, Harper’s spokesman, Kory Teneycke, dismissed the issue as irrelevant, saying the video’s release was an “act of desperation” by the Liberal campaign on the eve of the first leaders’ debate.

“I’m not going to get into a debate about a five-year-old speech that was delivered three Parliaments ago, two elections ago, when the prime minister was the leader of a party that no longer exists,” Teneycke said.

“We’re going to focus on the economy, which is the No. 1 issue Canadians want to talk about. We’re not going to be distracted by attacks from the Liberal war room.”
‘Shocking’ duplication: Rae

In an interview with Don Newman of CBC’s Politics, Rae called the Conservative party’s earlier attempt to brush off the issue “totally pathetic.”

He described the 2003 address as Harper’s “big coming-out speech as leader of the opposition.”

Immediately following the speech, then-foreign affairs minister Bill Graham praised Harper for his “thoughtful and powerful presentation of his party’s case.”

Rae called the apparent duplication “shocking,” saying it reveals the ideological approach of the Harper government in shaping Canada’s foreign policy and indicates the party’s own voice on foreign policy issues was weak.

“How does a political leader in Canada’s Parliament, on such a crucial issue, in fact an issue that in many ways defined our foreign policy for a generation, end up giving the exact same speech as another country’s leader?” Rae said earlier in the day. “Let alone one who was the key leader of George W. Bush’s ‘coalition of the willing.’ ”

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion earlier in the day called for Harper to be expelled from the House of Commons over the affair.

“It matters a lot, tremendously,” he told reporters at a campaign stop in Gatineau, Que. “Canadians want that their country [to] speak with its own voice on the world stage. It’s true for the prime minister; it’s true for the Opposition leader.”
Australian leader ally of Bush government

Howard was a stalwart ally of the Bush administration in the Iraq war and deployed Australian forces to participate in the U.S.-led invasion of the country in March 2003, which other world leaders, including then Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien, opposed.

Rae pointed to Chrétien’s decision as a moment that “made us proud to be Canadians.”

“The Liberal party has always believed that Canada must have its own voice on the world stage,” Rae said. “He did the right thing and said, ‘No.’ ”

The Liberals said they noticed the similarity between the two speeches only recently, when one of their staffers was searching for a copy of Harper’s editorial on the Iraq invasion published in the Wall Street Journal, the CBC’s James Cudmore reported from the campaign trail.

The staffer entered a portion of Harper’s comments into Google and came up with a link to Harper’s remarks and another to Howard’s. The party said it then ordered a video copy of Howard’s speech.

The revelation came as the federal party leaders were scaling back on campaign appearances to focus on preparing for this week’s debates ahead of the Oct. 14 election.

Segments of speeches

In one segment, both leaders are heard saying:

“It is inherently dangerous to allow a country, such as Iraq, to retain weapons of mass destruction, particularly in light of its past aggressive behaviour. If the world community fails to disarm Iraq we fear that other rogue states will be encouraged to believe that they too can have these most deadly of weapons to systematically defy international resolutions and that the world will do nothing to stop them.”

The clips then jump to Howard saying:

Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae says the similarities between the two speeches show that the Conservatives’ foreign policy cannot be trusted.Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae says the similarities between the two speeches show that the Conservatives’ foreign policy cannot be trusted. (Canadian Press)”As the possession of weapons of mass destruction spreads, so the danger of such weapons coming into the hands of terrorist groups will multiply. That is the ultimate nightmare which the world must take decisive and effective steps to prevent. Possession of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons by terrorists would constitute a direct, undeniable and lethal threat to Australia and its people.”

According to the Hansard transcripts, Harper said:

“As the possession of weapons of mass destruction spreads, the danger of such weapons coming into the hands of terrorist groups will multiply, particularly given in this case the shameless association of Iraq with rogue non-state organizations. That is the ultimate nightmare which the world must take decisive and effective steps to prevent. Possession of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons by terrorists would constitute a direct, undeniable and lethal threat to the world, including to Canada and its people.”

source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canadavotes/story/2008/09/30/rae-harper.html

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