Angry in the Great White North

On Monday, the Liberals were smelling blood in the water. The Conservatives were tracking constituents through their Orwellian database system CIMS.

The Liberals use a database system too. Of course, theirs is pure as the driven snow.

So on Monday Liberal MP Garth Turner went in for the kill. Waving a CIMS sign-up sheet signed by Conservative MPs to gain access to the system, Garth Turner accused the government of unethical behaviour.

You know the opposition is serious when they wave about props.

Government House Leader Peter Van Loan not only survived the attack, but managed to get in a shot when he spoke about the equivalent functionality of the Liberal system. That's when Garth Turner stepped in it. He used his follow-up question to accuse Peter Van Loan of quoting from my blog, alleging therefore that Van Loan's answer had no credibility.

In fact Peter Van Loan was quoting from the vendor's website.

Not only did Garth Turner squander his follow-up question with that accusation, he left himself open to a rather stinging rebuke from Peter Van Loan.

That same night I discovered the installation instructions for the ManagElect system that the Liberals use. These instructions, provided to every MP, explicitly sets up some sort of connection between the local MPs system (AdminElect) and the central Liberal installation of ManagElect via a file called merge.csv. During the installation process, the MP directs the central computer to find that file in a specific location on the MPs local computer.

In other words, the local MP's computer puts some sort of data into the merge.csv file. When the MP logs into the central computer and establishes a connection, that data is transfered to Liberal headquarters. I'm pretty confident that this is the direction of travel given that the home location of the merge file is the MP's computer and not the central computer.

I can't say exactly what the function of this "merge" file is, but a comma-separated value file is a traditional way to move data between databases (it is now being replaced by XML-formatted files).

So why am I bringing this up? Garth Turner attacked on Monday. Two more Question Periods have come and gone. There has been no mention of CIMS.

Why not? Clearly the Liberals thought they had some traction on the issue.

What has changed?

Update: News just in. The Conservative Party has delivered a notice of intent to pursue a libel action against the Liberal Party. That could part of the explanation.