Today, I picked up the Vancouver Sun wondering if  the Liberals' big revelation of the week  would hit the front page.  

I'm talking about the amazing  tale of Stephen Harper  repeating half of a bellicose speech, word for word,  about Iraq given two days earlier by then-Australian prime minister John Howard.

Harper used these cribbed words  in 2003 in an important address in the House of Commons on one of the biggest international issues of the decade.  Today, the Vancouver Sun  buried the story on page A4.

On page A6, Canwest columnist Don Martin gave it more play. There  were also sections of the 2003  speeches of Howard and Harper available for readers to compare.

So it's not as if this  story  didn't get covered, because it did. I'm more concerned about the  decision to keep it off the  front page and the absence of the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute's name from the articles.

Harper's speechwriter who confessed to copying Howard's words, Owen Lippert, is a former colleague of Vancouver Sun editorial page editor Fazil Mihlar. They both worked at the Fraser Institute in the 1990s.

Mihlar wrote the 1996 Fraser Institute book Change and Choice: A Policy Vision for British Columbia: a New Labour Regime for British Columbia: Towards Job Creation. Lippert was the project coordinator.

Lippert has a long history of involvement in B.C. politics and B.C. public issues, but you would never know it from reading this morning's Vancouver Sun. David Asper, whose family controls Canwest,  has  served on the board of trustees of the Fraser Institute.

As  Georgia Straight contributor  Donald Gutstein pointed out in a 2006 article, former Fraser Institute researchers Danielle Smith and John Robson joined the editorial boards of the Canwest-owned Calgary Herald and Ottawa Citizen, respectively. So Mihlar isn't the only Fraser Institute alumnus occupying an important position in the Canwest chain.

Flash back to the day the Liberals released their election platform. The following morning, the Globe and Mail carried a blazing front-page headline, above the fold, announcing that the Liberals would reduce taxes on income trusts.

The Vancouver Sun didn't mention the Liberal platform on the front page. It was on page A4.  

The metropolitan daily put the following stories on the front page instead:

* the resignation of a Chinese government official over a  tainted-milk scandal

* a first-person account of the financial crisis on Wall Street

* the performance of immigrant kids in postsecondary institutions

* the sale of AC/DC concert  tickets.

The Liberal platform  wasn't given nearly the same level of importance in the Vancouver Sun as the Globe and Mail  attached to it by placing it on the front page above the fold, where it could be seen in news boxes.  

Meanwhile, the Vancouver Sun published a pretty good  primer on carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems last weekend. But its coverage of climate change as an election  issue has been underwhelming, to say the least.  

Climate change is  perhaps Harper's weakest issue.

By  not hammering away at this, the Canwest media and its columnists are helping to ensure  that the environment  flies somewhat under the radar during this  campaign.  

No wonder the pollsters are saying it's not very high on the list of public concerns at the moment.

The Vancouver Sun also didn't give a lot of play to the  revelation that Burnaby-New Westminster Conservative candidate Sam Rakhra had been disciplined three times by the Real Estate Council of British Columbia.

Then there is the choice of columnists on the editorial page. SFU public-policy professor John Richards sent in a piece about the  value of a carbon tax--a key plank in the Liberal platform--which was rejected.

But the Vancouver Sun ran a piece by right-wing Canwest columnist Lorne Gunter ripping the Liberal platform. I notice today that there's another column by L. Ian MacDonald, who has been a very close associate of former prime minister Brian Mulroney.

Before the 2000 election, the Vancouver Sun shocked some  subscribers with its pre-election editorial  supporting the Canadian Alliance under Stockwell Day's leadership.

In the last election, the Vancouver Sun came out in support of the Conservatives under Stephen Harper in a pre-election editorial.

This time, I'm betting the Vancouver Sun will do it again. Here's my prediction:  go to  the editorial page on Saturday, October 11, and you'll probably  see a long, unsigned editorial expressing confidence in the Harper Conservatives.

Oh sure, there might be a couple of caveats tossed in to appease readers who want to vote Liberal. You could read  something in the fourth or fifth paragraph  about how Harper's government  could make improvements  to its climate-change plan.

There  may even be some tepid editorial criticism of Harper's broken promise on income trusts or even some questioning of  his decision to reduce the GST in the face of criticism from economists across the country.

But that will likely be offset with a condemnation of carbon taxes, which the paper's editorials have questioned in the past.

I expect that  the Conservative endorsement will  be couched in a lot of reassurances about the importance of staying the course in difficult times.

The  editorial might even crib one of the Conservatives' favourite lines: that it's too risky to go with Stephane Dion's carbon tax (as if there's no risk in proceeding with Harper's do-little climate-change policies).

Why do I write these words? Because as I read the Vancouver Sun's coverage on a daily basis, I can't conceive of  its editorial board  doing anything else.

Canwest  has gone easy on the  Harper Conservatives for a long time.  The Georgia Straight, on the other hand, will take a particularly aggressive stance in its October 9 issue, which will be our last publication before Canadians vote on October 14.

For anyone who questions why we will do this, it's because Vancouver is not a conservative city.

And  Vancouver doesn't need another  conservative paper telling us we should vote for a guy who relied on a plagiarized speech in 2003 to  explain why Canadian kids should be sent to their deaths in Iraq.