Cases in which a country aids a dissenting faction of a rival government or uses economic power in order to influence the outcomes of an general election are not rare. There is, for example, the US and international pressure on the Polish government and the crumbling Soviet bloc that gave Lech Walesa and Solidarnosc their 1989 win. There's also the case of China's use of its economic power for influencing elections in Zambia.

Yet, never in all my years, have I ever heard of a country trying to effect the outcome of a foreign country's political party primary. That's exactly what the conservative government of Canada seems to have done with last week's Democratic primaries.

This from Jeet Heer, writer for The Guardian's community blog, Comment is Free:

From news accounts, there seems to have been two separate leaks. The initial and less damaging leak came from an off-the-record statement by Ian Brodie, the prime minister's chief of staff, who sought to reassure reporters that anti-Nafta rhetoric coming from Hillary Clinton's camp wasn't serious. Brodie's account was then amplified and turned into an anti-Obama smear by a false account given in a diplomatic memo, whose origin is still unknown. Bowing to opposition pressure, Harper has promised to investigate both leaks.

Read the whole article because it gives an amazing historical re-cap of how the conservative movement of Canada is ghastly intertwined to the one here in the United States. So in context, this is seen as an attempt to damage the reputation of the front-runner of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, because most conservatives believe they cannot beat him as easily as they could beat Hillary Clinton, whom many see as the perfect rival for John McCain.

What's astounding is that, if the vitriolic arch-conservative pundit, Rush Limbaugh, is credited with helping Hillary Clinton win Ohio and Texas, then Canadian TV may have been his primary ally in this effort. And since this is unprecedented, we will not know for a long time if any laws were broken or if we would have had to redo the primaries because of it.

So stay tuned because this story has just begun.