On March 20, 2003, the then Canadian Opposition leader Stephen Harper got up in Parliament and put the case for supporting the US-led invasion of Iraq. It was considered a good speech, good enough, indeed, to be printed up as a pamphlet and mailed out to supporters.

Five years later, and with Mr Harper now battling for re-election as Prime Minister, it has emerged that it was not really his speech at all: nearly half of it was lifted word for word from a speech given by John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, two days earlier.

A senior staffer in Mr Harper's campaign, Owen Lippert, resigned yesterday after admitting that he was behind the plagiarism. “Pressed for time, I was overzealous in copying segments of another world leader’s speech,” he explained.

But the Liberals, voted from office in 2006 and facing defeat in a general election on October 14, were less forgiving, and posted a side-by-side video comparison on YouTube. “How does a political leader in Canada’s Parliament, on such a crucial issue, end up giving the exact same speech as another country’s leader?” asked Bob Rae, the party's foreign affairs spokesman.

Mr Lippert said that neither Mr Harper nor anyone else in his office had any idea he had copied from the Howard speech.

Tom Flanagan, a former campaign director for Mr Harper, called it an eloquent speech in his book 'Harper’s Team' and wrote that they printed out the speech in pamphlet form and mailed out thousands of copies.

Mr Rae said a number of lines from the Australian leader's speech were also duplicated in a guest column in The Wall Street Journal under Mr Harper’s byline on March 29, 2003, and in other columns in the Toronto Star, National Post and Ottawa Citizen.

A spokesman for Mr Howard delcined to comment, although John Kunkel, an Australian economist who served as his speechwriter from 2004-2007 said that he was unlikely to take offence.

“I think he’d probably find it mildly amusing,” Mr Kunkel said. “He’d probably have a good degree of sympathy for his good friend, Mr Harper.”

Times Recommends

• Mandela’s tribe threatens President Zuma
• The French empire strikes back
• Wife of cheating governor exacts a political revenge