Two examples from the current campaign. The first is the casual mendacity of his party's critiques of the Liberals. On a Sunday conference call with reporters, a Conservative spokesman talked of the successes of their first week. Among them: "We've put the Liberals on the defensive on issues we believe have the potential to drive votes." The strategist listed three such issues. "Hiking the GST, scrapping the $100-a-month child benefit, and the imposition of the carbon tax."

Now, you can take or leave what the Conservatives have to say about Dion's carbon tax. But there is not a word in his party's platform about increasing the GST. In a July interview with Maclean's, Dion said flatly he will not consider such a move. And far from scrapping the $100-a-month child benefit, Dion has promised to double it for low-income families.

The Conservatives are relying on two-year-old statements by Dion or other Liberals as evidence for the plans they impute to Dion today. On other issues Harper simply invents Liberal policy as he goes along. Dion calls his carbon-tax plan a Green Shift because he wants to shift taxation from income to carbon: increase carbon taxes, cut income taxes. Harper has decided Dion means only half of it.

"There aren't going to be income-tax cuts" if the Liberals are elected, Harper told startled reporters in Montreal. "If you have $60 billion of new spending" — another number the Conservatives have invented from whole cloth — "you're going to need the carbon-tax money to pay for those. You're not going to have money to do income-tax cuts or anything else. Every time a politician wants to impose a new tax, historically, they always claim it's either going to be revenue-neutral or it's going to be temporary. And neither of those is ever true."

So there you have it. What Dion is saying this week at every stop cannot be believed, because what he said two years ago must be held as gospel. This is the worst kind of cheap politics. The Liberals should know; they used to be masters at the same sort of carnival-midway trickery. Remember the secret Reform and Alliance plans to scrap medicare, the hidden Harper agenda on abortion? Harper is taking evident pleasure in serving the same medicine back to the Liberals. The only losers are Canadian voters who hoped that by changing governments they might, by some measure of political morality, be trading up.

The other example of Harper's disturbing flexibility is that policy on Afghanistan. Recall that the extension of the Canadian Forces' deployment to 2011 is the second such extension of Harper's term as prime minister. In 2006, with the Liberal leadership campaign underway, Harper called a quick vote in Parliament on an extension to 2009. It was a transparent attempt to divide Liberals on a sensitive question, and it worked a charm. Every aspiring Liberal leader with a seat in the Commons voted against the extension, with the exception of Michael Ignatieff, whose supporters provided enough votes to let the extension pass.

There followed a proposal for a second extension, also subject to the approval of the Commons, earlier this year. After considerable negotiation, Dion's Liberals supported this second extension to 2011.

At this point, logic and the record should intervene. Logic says that if an extension could be followed by another extension, then yet another extension can't be ruled out. The record is ample: Conservative cabinet ministers were disdainful of the idea that Canada should send the Taliban enemy a date on which we would send our soldiers home.

Here's Peter MacKay on April 10: "We do not talk about how we might retreat or withdraw. That is not part of the public discourse that will help our troops. That is not at all something that will further the cause of elevating the people of Afghanistan."

Except now it is! "Part of what we're trying to do in setting an end date is ensure that we are successful," Harper told campaign reporters in Montreal. "Because if we don't set end dates and we don't have targets, the mission will go on forever and we will not be successful. We will end up being responsible for the ongoing management of Afghan security. And that will not work. The Afghans themselves ultimately have to be responsible."

As often happens when Harper is throwing his gearbox into reverse, the Prime Minister grew increasingly fervent. "We've been there three years already, we've got three more years, and we are determined to make this mission successful. But making it successful means we achieve an objective within a reasonable period of time. Six years? Six years in Kandahar? We were in World War II for six years! You know, we've got to be able to get to the end point."

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