UPDATED: Seriously, y’all: Attributions. Use them!

Because I love making conspiracy-obsessed commenters look silly:

A fresh allegation of plagiarism against Stephane Dion, who delivered a speech at the 2005 United Nations Climate Change Conference that included seven sentences from the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment without properly citing the source.

Bad former Environment Minister! Bad! Always err on the side of giving credit, even when quoting from a publicly available report that was, in fact, the subject of the speech in question!

UPDATE: Um. Y’all realize that this was’t one of the two major speeches which were given by Dion at the opening and closing of the Montreal conference, right? It was a much shorter address – remarks, really – that were delivered at a parallel event to mark Arctic Day, and not – as some commenters and bloggers seem to have mistakenly concluded – during what he has called a pivotal moment in his career.

Really, did the National Post – which seems to be the one other English media outlet to pick up this story – even look at the speech in question? Because this article – which seems to rely heavily on Steve Janke’s detective work – refers to Dion having “flown to a UN conference on climate change … to read — pretty much word for word — the executive summary of a year-old UN report.”  The conference was in Montreal – a mere two hour drive from Ottawa, not in New York, or on the other side of the world – and, as noted above, this was not one of the two speeches that he delivered at the meeting.

EVEN UPDATEDIER: I have to confess to having suddenly been struck by bout of bepuzzlement over who, exactly, it was who uncovered this “story” in the first place. Was it Steve Janke, or Trusty Tory correspondent Paulsstuff? Although the two posts appeared at roughly the same time — yesterday afternoon — neither appears to have credited the other. Is it possible that the source may have been an unknown third party, who sent along a friendly tip to more than one blogger? The alternative scenario — that Janke and Paulstuff independently, yet virtually simultaneously, stumbled over the same speech, and came to the same conclusions — would seem to be a coincidence so statistically unlikely as to be impossible.