For the second time in less than 24 hours, the federal NDP has been forced to issue an abject apology for falsely smearing a political opponent.

NDP House leader Libby Davies formally apologized Thursday in Ottawa on behalf of her party for spreading allegations that a Liberal candidate in the last federal election tried to bribe his NDP rival to drop out of the race.

"The New Democratic Party admits we seriously erred in making the allegations public and in putting a young and inexperienced candidate in a position where he felt justified in making those allegations and to repeat them on some 40 occasions to media across Canada," Davies told the Commons.

Her profuse apology, required as part of a lawsuit settlement, couldn't have been more badly timed for the NDP.

It came half a day after another New Democrat MP, Irene Mathyssen, was forced to apologize to Tory MP James Moore. She had accused him of looking at "soft porn" photos of a "scantily clad" woman on his laptop computer in Parliament.

After speaking to Moore late Wednesday, Mathyssen accepted his explanation that he'd been looking at pictures of his girlfriend and apologized to him, said a party spokesman.

Mathyssen was in her London riding Thursday but is expected to make a formal apology to Moore in the Commons on Monday.

Thursday's apology stems from accusations levelled during the 2006 election by Jeffrey Hansen-Carlson, the NDP candidate in Abbotsford, B.C. He accused his Liberal rival, David Oliver, and Oliver's campaign manager, Gordie Kahlon, of trying to bribe him to drop out of the race and throw his support behind Oliver.

Former prime minister Paul Martin yanked Oliver as the Liberal candidate in the riding hours after the allegation surfaced, declaring that he had "zero tolerance for that kind of thing."

Oliver and Kahlon sued the NDP and Davies acknowledged Thursday that the party has paid damages to the pair to resolve the lawsuit.

"There were never any facts to support an allegation of bribery or attempted bribery," she told the Commons.

"The NDP formally apologizes to them, their friends, their families, political supporters and particularly the voters of Abbotsford who cast their votes while a candidate's character and conduct had been improperly put under a cloud by our campaign team's actions."

Davies admitted that the NDP erred in arranging for Hansen-Carlson to repeat his accusations widely in the media 10 days before the Jan. 23, 2006, election. And she said it made "another serious error in judgment" in failing to make public a letter from Canada's elections commissioner, three days before the election, which cleared the two Liberals.

"Mr. Oliver and Mr. Kahlon remained under a cloud of suspicion far longer than was appropriate. We erred in not making that letter public immediately and we acknowledge that."

Davies said she personally is "not satisfied with the manner in which this was handled."

She added that the NDP has adopted to new procedures "to ensure all due diligence in matters of fact and law" in future and promised "this kind of incident will not happen again."