The government’s rhetorically problematic week comes to an unfortunate end.

The prime minister and his parliamentary secretary, Peterborough MP Dean Del Mastro, claimed in the Commons that the Liberals were the only party that used American calling firms. “We’ve done some checking,” the PM said, and “we’ve only found that it was the Liberal Party that did source its phone calls from the United States.”

But documents show 14 Conservative campaigns enlisted the telephone services of an Ohio company called Front Porch Strategies. During the election, the company made thousands of calls into each of those Canadian ridings from its headquarters in Columbus. In fact, Del Mastro’s own campaign used the American firm twice during his successful bid for re-election last year.