Angry in the Great White North

In February, the Liberals were on a tear.  They were accusing Prime Minister Stephen Harper of trying to bribe Chuck Cadman, or at least of knowing of such a bribe attempt.  If Chuck Cadman voted against the Paul Martin government, the Conservatives would give the dying MP a life insurance policy worth $1 million.

That is a serious charge.  Indeed, it is a criminal offense to bribe, or to conspire to bribe, an MP.

The Liberals made their charges in the House of Commons, where they are protected, but then they repeated the charges in two posts on the party's website:

• Harper Must Come Clean About Allegations of Conservative Bribery, Liberals say
• Harper Knew of Conservative Bribery

By restating the charges on the website, the Liberal Party opened itself to a lawsuit.  Stephen Harper filed a $2.5 million lawsuit that has since been increased to $3.5 million.

The Liberals refused to back down, and refused to take down the stories.  You could still reach those stories via the Liberal Party website.

Until now.

To get to these stories, you would go the Liberal Party home page, select "Newsroom" from the top navigation, and then "News Stories" from the dropdown menu:

From here, you go to the bottom, where there used to be a navigation link to go previous stories:

I recovered that image from archives.  The current news page has no such navigation:

The missing HTML had the class pagenav.  It doesn't appear in the markup for the page.

Just a minor mistake?  Or is this a quiet attempt to deal with the lawsuit by making the pages identified in the lawsuit unreachable?

Removing access to these pages could be a prelude to an offer to settle.  But if so, the Liberals made a mistake, because I can still reach these pages from an official Liberal Party website.

Let's say the Liberals did alter their home page so that, strictly speaking, you could not reach those pages via any links made available on the home page.  The Liberal Party also maintains a second website called Forum Liberalis.  It is an official Liberal Party website for policy discussion, open to the public, and it includes a feed of all Liberal Party news stories.  That feed has not been truncated.  If you follow the links back (31 pages right now, so you need some patience), you get to page that links to these two stories:

• Party News: Harper Must Come Clean About Allegations of Conservative Bribery, Liberals say
• Party News: Harper Knew of Conservative Bribery

Follow the links inside these excerpts and you get to the original two stories that form the core of the lawsuit.

I can get to the two stories via Forum Liberalis, but not via the main Liberal Party site.

It looks to me like someone was trying to clean up a problem, and missed a spot.

Update: The navigation has been restored, and the two stories are accessible again:

A technical problem?  Probably.  But also a legal one for the Liberals.