Here's one of the less ridiculous Ottawa anecdotes of the last few weeks.

The other day, "sources close to Prime Minister Stephen Harper" — we have to phrase it that way, but if you guess who I mean, you'll probably get it right — summoned the Ottawa bureau chiefs of the country's large news organizations to a nice conference room on Parliament Hill. There were cookies and Coke. But no Diet Coke. Clearly they don't know me. The point of the meeting was to explain, on a not-for-attribution basis, why Stephen Harper is planning to call an election.

This is a delicate business because Harper campaigned on a promise of fixed election dates. He passed a law setting a fixed election date — Oct. 29, 2009. That's a nice date, isn't it? Specific. Concrete. Fixed. In Victoria during the last campaign, he said fixed election dates "prevent governments from calling snap elections for short-term political advantage." He said they "stop leaders from trying to manipulate the calendar."

When the bill was passed, the Government House leader, Peter Van Loan, celebrated: "Never again will the government of the day be able to play around with the date of an election for its own crass political motives."

Now here's the Prime Minister, and what's he doing? Manipulating the calendar! Why's he doing it? For short-term political advantage!

Whose motives was the government pursuing? Its own! And what kind of motives are they? Crass!

But it's not as though there's a law against that.

What's that?

There is?

Well. Truth be told — and it might as well be, if only for novelty's sake — the Prime Minister is a mite sheepish about all this, although not sheepish enough to . . . you know . . . keep his word. So we were summoned over to the nice conference room to have this sudden turnabout explained to us.

But that's not actually what this column is about. Harper passed a law, he doesn't like the law, we should ignore the law, blah blah blah, election, whatever. You'll hear plenty about all this without my help. Anyway. While we were over there, the PM's people mentioned their dismay at comments Stéphane Dion had made regarding a private member's bill from Ken Epp, a Conservative back-bencher. Epp was the patron of Bill C-484, the Unborn Victims of Crime Act, which would make it an offence "to injure, cause the death of or attempt to cause the death of a child before or during its birth" while assaulting the mother. It's a fetal-protection bill. Supporters and opponents lined up fairly neatly along anti-abortion and pro-choice lines, even though C-484 wasn't about abortion as such.

Recently Dion said he opposed the bill because he supports a woman's right to choose. He called on Harper to state his own views on abortion. At our briefing for reporters in the nice conference room with Coke and cookies, the Prime Minister's men pointed to Dion's remarks as more evidence that "there must be an election in the air."

One of the Prime Minister's men said it was odd for Dion to be opposing Epp's bill now because the Commons has already voted on it. Which is true. And Dion didn't bother to show up for the vote. Also true. And that 27 Liberal MPs voted in favour of Epp's bill, which makes the bill a bit problematic if you want to use it as evidence of fundamental differences between Liberals and Conservatives. True once again. We're on a roll.

Then the PM's man told us, "Two abortion bills are before the House. Both are Liberal." He named Bill C-338, from Liberal MP Paul Steckle, which seeks to ban late-term abortions and is therefore, indeed, an abortion bill; and Bill C-543, from Liberal MP Brent St. Denis, which would add the victim's pregnancy as an aggravating circumstance for sentencing purposes. So if you were liable to a sentence of X for assaulting someone, you could face a greater sentence Y if you knew she was pregnant when you did it.

St. Denis, who told me he is "publicly pro-choice" and who voted against Epp's "Unborn Victims of Crime" bill, was a bit flabbergasted to hear his bill described as an "abortion bill." The PM's guy "either hadn't read the bill" when he called it that, "or misspoke."

And there things would have stayed, if this was only an ordinarily depressing month in Ottawa. Government climbs down from election pledge, calls scribes in to put the best spin possible on it all, overreaches in legitimately decrying Liberal hypocrisy. But then this happened.

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