Yup, that about covers it.

For the Harper government, under whose reign even information on snowfall patterns has been deemed too sensitive for public release, a new benchmark has been achieved. A news story based upon a press release is now considered evidence of a “leak,” and costly resources in the Department of National Defence have been unleashed to find the ghost.

At this point a culture of secrecy officially becomes a full-fledged cult of secrecy. It can’t even be explained as just another grossly improper political move, such as wasting DND time and money on digging up dirt on the Opposition.

Not that MacKay, apparently a sensitive soul, hasn’t been up to those tricks all along:

[S]ources told the newspaper the military police force was being used inappropriately to investigate journalists who wrote or broadcast embarrassing information about MacKay and the Canadian Forces leadership.

Yikes. And what an odd sympathetic vibration, as Barack Obama’s increasingly aberrant administration is contemporaneously embroiled in the AP scandal.

Our Canadian political culture, never particularly robust, appears to be descending into utter madness. The obsessive control of information-flow that has been a hallmark of this government from the time it came to power (and which, with a few honourable exceptions, has been enabled by the complaisant media) now extends to publicly available material that may be “embarrassing” to this Minister or that. And the worst part of this is, like the proverbial frogs in a pot, we are proceeding by slow degrees to find all of this perfectly normal.

UPDATE: More. A general’s high-living habits on the public dime dwarf Senator Duffy’s by several orders of magnitude. Revealed through a normal Access to Information request, this story, too, precipitates an investigation by the National Investigation Service. [H/t Paul Wells]