Only tangentially tape-related: Remember all that confusion over when the meeting took place?

A quick recap, in case you’ve forgotten: Dona Cadman told Zytaruk that she found out about the offer on May 17th, 2005, but Doug Finley and Tom Flanagan – the two men who claimed to have met with Cadman to discuss his possible return to caucus were adamant that the meeting actually took place two days later, on May 19th. The publishers eventually took the extraordinary step of removing the date completely from the final text of the book.

In an affidavit dated May 23, 2008, Dona Cadman once again states that her husband told her about the offer after meeting with Conservative officials on May 17th – not May 19th, as alleged by Tom Flanagan and Doug Finley:

Prior to my meeting with Mr. Harper on September 9, 2005, I told Mr. Zytaruk that on May 17, 2005 my husband told me that earlier that day two Conservative Party representatives had offered him a $1 million insurance policy. My husband never revealed the identities of these two people to me. Mr. Zytaruk included this information at pages 273-275 of a draft of the book he wrote about my husband (Like A Rock: The Chuck Cadman Story) attached as Exhibit “B”. It is my clear recollection that the date that my husband told me that he had received the offer of a $1 million insurance policy was May 17, 2005 and not May 19, 2005.

In his affidavit, which is also included in the package, Cadman’s former staffer Dan Wallace insists that the only meeting that took place was on May 19th, which backs up the Flanagan/Finley version of events. There is also an affidavit from Ray Novak, who identifies himself the Prime Minister’s executive assistant, in which he states that the meeting was on the 19th.