…is not mine.

Perhaps a harbinger of what is to come for Canadians across the country as the Harper government prepares to slash thousands of public service jobs: A woman is forced to give birth in a motel bathtub without medication because Citizenship Canada refused to confirm her permanent residency status (she’s married to a Canadian). Apparently current staffing levels do not permit them even to open mail for up to a year.

Meanwhile, the mephitic vapour of Conservative corruption continues to spread. Conservative workers are now coming forward to say they were ordered to mislead voters about the location of polling stations. The number of ridings affected is now in the forty range.

Let’s get one thing straight. This isn’t a case of “but…but…the Liberals. ADSCAM!!!!11!!.” The sponsorship scandal was disgraceful, deeply corrupt, and more than one head should have rolled for it. Both the Liberals and the old Progressive Conservatives stuck their arms up to the shoulder into the national cookie-jar at one time or another.

But the Harper Conservatives have made the Liberals look like a choir of heavenly angels, and that takes considerable doing.

Patronage, the spoils system that both parties have gleefully indulged in over the years, has come to be a familiar part of the political landscape in Canada. But the Cons have wildly outdone themselves in that respect, appointing cronies faster than Pope John Paul II created saints. And as for that other quaint practice known as porkbarreling, they have set standards hitherto unimaginable. Unprecedented! Name one Liberal Cabinet minister who ever fraudulently diverted $50 million from a border security envelope to his own riding to purchase an election.

Need more convincing? Here’s a whole catalogue of knavish tricks, courtesy of journalist Lawrence Martin. Good God, how much more do Canadians need to rise up en masse?

The Harper regime, unlike any other government in our country’s history, has been stinkingly corrupt from its very inception. For six years now it has battened upon the insides of our diseased body politic, half tapeworm and half maggot, thriving on the very infection that it spreads. Have we become too ill by now, too torpid, to pluck this parasite from our entrails and restore ourselves to health?

[H/ts galore to Marie Ève, b/c, Shelley Cooper-Stephenson on Facebook and loads of the usual Twitterers]