Not as surprised as the kids....

Prime Minister Stephen Harper reflected on his first 100 days in office today, saying it's been a "very challenging, busy and exciting" time.

"Things must be going pretty well because the other day my wife burst into my office and announced to me that I had just passed the longevity record set of John Turner," he quipped to a London, Ont. audience in a noon-hour speech.

"What's worst is that she seemed somewhat surprised by this," Harper said to laughter.

Say it ain't so, Premier

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty popped a few childhood fantasies this morning during a stop at Ottawa's children's hospital, where he opened a new blood screening lab for newborn babies.

"When you get older, first they take Santa Claus away, they take the tooth fairy away from you, they take the Easter Bunny away from you. The only real magic left in life is a brand new baby," McGuinty told a crowd of hospital workers - and one 5-year-old girl.

Here's hoping she had adopted that adult technique of tuning out politicians.

After that announcement, we'll see what McGuinty gets in his stocking this Christmas.

The Premier also quipped about the experience of growing up in a family with nine brothers and sisters.

"It seemed that most of my friends would get a puppy as a gift. I would get a sibling," he said.

Liberals helping Liberals: NDP

The Ontario government is looking after its friends by hiring a former party staffer and brother of a top advisor to Premier Dalton McGuinty to design websites, the New Democrats charge.

“There’s clearly a close relationship,” MPP Peter Kormos (Niagara Centre) said Thursday after revealing Lorne Kinsella, brother of well-known advisor Warren Kinsella, is now on the civil service payroll.

Government Services Minister Gerry Phillips defended the hiring, saying Kinsella is an experienced designer who is saving the province $1.5 million a year because the work is no longer contracted out to private firms.

“The taxpayers would say it’s a wise use of money.”

But Kormos said the hiring smacks of a “patronage spree” that undermines McGuinty as “the self-proclaimed champ of squeaky-clean government” because Kinsella is depicting web pages done for the government on his own website, at LorneKinsella.ca, designed to attract customers to his private design business.

“Is it appropriate for Mr. Kinsella to be promoting himself on his own website with these government websites that the government now says he’s only doing in the course of his government job?” Kormos asked.

“Talk about a Liberal culture of entitlement.”

The criticisms from Kormos appeared to have found their mark -- the website could not be called up on Friday afternoon.

Phillips said there are no rules against hiring relatives of government advisors.

“Brothers or sisters are not prohibited from being employed,” Phillips added. “He’s a public servant, subject to all the rules of the public service.”

Kinsella has prepared websites for the following ministries: education; training, colleges and universities; natural resources; finance; and research and innovation.

He is listed in the latest government phone book as manager of web communications and marketing in the cabinet office.

“I think the picture is somewhat murkier than the government would have us believe,” Kormos said.

Imitation -- not a handshake -- is the sincerest form of flattery

It seems like only yesterday that Scott Brison, then a Progressive Conservative MP, was refusing to shake the hand of Tony Clement, then an Ontario Progressive Conservative cabinet minister and leading proponent of uniting the federal Tories and the Canadian Alliance.

The slight occurred at the federal Tories’ Christmas party on Parliament Hill in December, 2001.

Clement, one of most genial people in Canadian politics, was so taken aback by Brison’s rudeness that he noted it in conversations with friends.

Brison, it seems, was peeved by the unite-the-right movement.

Fast forward almost five years, and Brison, now a Liberal MP and leadership hopeful, has ripped off one of Clement’s signature policy ideas for his campaign for the Grit crown.

It’s a tax deferment plan that would allow young people to have $25,000 of their annual income be tax free for their first decade in the work force.

Brison was touting it Wednesday at a luncheon speech in Toronto.

But the Liberal’s "innovation" was something Clement first devised in 2001-02, when he was a candidate for the Ontario Tory leadership. It was known then as Jumpstart 250 and one of its other architects, Roh Gupta, is now Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s economic adviser.

So even though he may not want to shake a Conservative’s hand, Brison is obviously still a Tory at heart.

Adscam alert

Justice John Gomery, the Quebec judge whose public inquiry in the sponsorship scandal helped defeat the federal Liberals in January, was spotted strutting through the east door of the Ontario Legislature late Thursday.

Either that or it was Gomery’s twin brother.

The famed jurist’s appearance in the provincial seat of government had tongues wagging among the Liberals and the NDP. Strangely, the Progressive Conservatives were conspicuously silent about the apparent Gomery sighting.

Perhaps he was popping by the visit the Tories, where he would be a welcome visitor.

After all, if he could do to Premier Dalton McGuinty what he did to former prime minister Paul Martin, there would be some happy Ontario PCs come the 2007 election.

Same policies, same clothes

At the end of Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s speech to the House and the Senate, Stephen Harper’s wife Laureen was introducing Howard’s wife Janette to some of the members of the Harper cabinet. When she reached Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda, she cried out cheerfully "What great taste you have!"

Ms Oda and Mrs. Howard were wearing almost identical suits.

Pariahs' Society

Here's a riddle:  What's worse than being a lobbyist in Stephen Harper's Ottawa?

Answer: Being a member of the parliamentary press gallery.

We know this to be true because of a strange development on Wednesday, after Harper pitched a fit and refused to hold a press conference with Ottawa reporters because they wouldn't agree to have the PMO decide who got to ask questions.

This was at noon. The problem, however, was that the Prime Minister's Office actually had a message it wanted to transmit to the media for the midday news cycle about why Harper was holding a vote on Afghanistan in the Commons later that day and why it would be a mistake for MPs to vote against extending the mission to 2009.

So, at 1:30, the PMO got on a conference call with some Tory lobbyists around town (yes, contrary to popular myth, they have not been reassigned to the Arctic under Harper's acccountability crackdown.) Without saying why they couldn't phone reporters themselves, the PMO issued a request for lobbyists to step in and feed some lines to selected political reporters at major news bureaus. Dutifully, several of them stepped up to the plate and made the calls as requested. They were friendly, courteous, informative, even funny  -- everything the PMO communications staff can't seem to be these days.

But it does raise the question: just what is Harper paying his communications people to do, if they have to "contract out" civility to lobbyists? That's a whole larger riddle.

One good sulk deserves....

Speaking of taking all your marbles and going home, today was the second consecutive day for Harper to stage a sulky walkout. On Tuesday, learning that the Commons operation committee had nixed his choice for a public appointments director, Harper abandoned the idea of a commission all together and said he'd wait until he had a majority government. So there.

But David McGuinty, MP for Ottawa South, has another idea. Hey, how about Justice John Gomery, the guy who investigated the Liberal sponsorship scandal, as the director of Harper's new squeaky-clean commission? As McGuinty said in a news release yesterday:

“If the Prime Minister is serious about reforming the appointments process - something I’ve supported from day one - he will nominate someone with the multipartisan credibility to get the job done."

And if Harper doesn't like that idea, McGuinty said, he could also ask the Commons operation committee to come up with a new short list of candidates.

The ball, or the marbles, are back in Harper's court.

Listing out of control...

Prime Minister Stephen Harper had intended to talk to reporters today about his government's controversial plan to keep Canadian troops in Afghanistan through to 2009.

But communications staff in his office have been keen to control who gets to lob questions at Harper when he makes himself available.

However, the Parliament Hill press gallery has rebelled at the efforts to vet the questioners and yesterday reporters refused to sign up on a PMO list to ask a question.

Instead, reporters seeking to ask questions were lined up behind a microphone, an arrangement that has worked well in the past but one the current PMO doesn't like.

Carolyn Stewart Olsen, Harper's press secretary, waded into the group of reporters to try and broker a compromise. But she found that the reporters, unhappy at the PMO's moves to limit media access to the government, were in no mood to accede to Harper's demands.

The result? Harper cancelled his meeting with the media.

Broadcast news

Gathered in their secret weekly caucus meeting this morning behind soundproof doors in Parliament, Liberal MPs were in for a shock as they discussed the thorny issue of how to handle Prime Minister Stephen Harper's motion to extend Canada's military mission to Afghanistan.

Ralph Goodale, the Liberal House leader, brought proceedings to halt when he interrupted to say that one of the Liberal MPs was surreptitiously using a Blackberry to pass on everything that was being said to CTV reporter Robert Fife, according to one participant. It was assumed that the information pipeline went dry at that point.