Watergate vs. Grewal

Over at The Tyee, Mark Leiren-Young is pretty critical of recent Conservative political decisions in his article Canada's Stupid Party. I think he goes a bit far. As leader of the opposition, Harper has to play with the hand he's dealt, which isn't always winning cards. But leave that aside. Mr. Leiren-Young said something that jumped out at me.

After the bitterness over Belinda, Harper seemed to pin all his hopes on the, um, thin Grewal of a bizarre espionage mission – that supposedly wasn’t officially endorsed, but certainly wasn’t disavowed either. Harper stood by his man, and his tape, despite the fact that it “accidentally,” lost fourteen minutes during the initial dubbing. For anyone keeping score, that’s only four a half minutes less than Nixon lost from the Watergate tapes.

The fourteen missing minutes mentioned by Leiren-Young is only from one of the four sound files that have been released: the meeting between Dosanjh, Murphy, and Grewal (these fourteen minutes are the yellow in the first slide show). In fact, there were another 18 minutes missing from the conversation between Murphy and Grewal. (Calculation is complicated by the fact that there is an eight-minute version, a four-minute version, and a 25 minute version. If you surf over to the new slide show of the conversation between Murphy and Grewal, what is white is new.)

Now, if 18 minutes could bring down a presidency, surely 32 minutes (14 from the one tape and 18 from the other) should be enough to get Grewal kicked out of the Conservative caucus. And one wonders why this hasn't happened. What. Does he have pictures of something? Or is it tapes?

[Edited slightly, including correction of erroneous addition]