Harper speech plagiarized; Tory staffer resigns.

CTV.ca News Staff

A campaign worker for the Conservatives has resigned, after the Liberals showed a 2003 speech by Stephen Harper that plagiarized sections of an address by then-Australian prime minister John Howard. "In 2003, I worked in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition. I was tasked with -- and wrote -- a speech for the then Leader of the Opposition," Owen Lippert said in a press release issued Tuesday. "Pressed for time, I was overzealous in copying segments of another world leader's speech. Neither my superiors in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition nor the Leader of the Opposition was aware that I had done so." Lippert, who also became a senior policy advisor for the Canadian International Development Agency in 2008, apologized to "all involved." Just hours before Lippert's resignation, Liberal candidate Bob Rae accused Harper of plagiarizing almost half of Howard's speech, when Harper was opposition leader of the Canadian Alliance At a press conference, Rae showed video of Harper giving a speech in Parliament on March 20, 2003 -- the first day U.S. forces began bombing Baghdad. The video is contrasted with a speech two days earlier from Howard, in which he gives a strikingly similar address.Much of Harper's address matches Howard's virtually word-for-word.