Throughout that week of special mid-recess hearings in August 2008, a series of party-connected witnesses alternately failed to appear, citing improper service, or, in a few memorable instances, deliberately did so on days when they weren't actually listed on the schedule, whereupon they would demand to be allowed to testify immediately. When gently but firmly rebuffed by the chair, they would storm out of the room to the waiting media throng, insisting all the way that they were being silenced by the tyrannical opposition majority. 

In fact, I was sitting not more than a few inches away from the party's then-political director, Doug Finley -- now, of course, a senator -- when he showed up, bright and more than a little early, three days before he was scheduled to appear. Squeezing himself in at the table alongside the scheduled witnesses, he informed the chair he was ready to take questions; after he was, entirely predictably, rebuffed, he very nearly had to be removed by Hill security when he refused to vacate the seat. When his name came up on the witness list later that week, however, he was nowhere in sight.

So, are we going to see the same scenario unfold on Thursday, despite the fact that the opposition parties have every intention of backing a last-minute NDP motion that would delay Mulroney's appearance until after the government turns over a stack of documents that, they claim, are essential to ensuring that they're able to ask the right questions? 

At the moment, there's no reason to believe that the documents in question will be produced on demand, but even if the government declines to do so, it's easy to see what the talking points will be if Mulroney heads back to China, his testimony unheard: They offered to make the ambassador available, but the opposition parties were more interested in playing politics than getting to the truth.  But is it such an unreasonable request, really, that committee members have access to  all the material, rather than allowing the process to be hijacked by what would be, for the most part, a he said/he said debate between two diplomats, without sufficient independent evidence to corroborate either version of events? 

It's fair to say that, by the end of what one former Conservative candidate turned overzealous early bird witness described as the circus maximus at the in-and-out hearings, the government had won the public relations battle, if only by successfully sowing so much confusion that it became all but impossible to separate the fact-finding efforts of the committee from the freak show that the process quickly became. Given the subtle similarities between what happened back then, and what's going on behind the scenes this week, it's worth considering the possibility that PMO may be dusting off a vintage play book in its efforts to manage what could easily become a far more politically damaging committee investigation.