One more piece of bad news for Jane Pitfield's campaign: besides having one of the worst glamour shots we've ever seen on her media page (see above), whoever's writing her blog for her is cribbing Spacing Votes, Spacing Magazine's election blog. Details are a bit scarce, but what we know for sure so far is that for several days a recent entry on Jane Pitfield's blog copied one of John Lorinc's - almost word for word - without credit.

Here's John Lorinc's post:

How else to explain the paper-thin promise he made yesterday — $28 million to Toronto’s 13 distressed neighbourhoods, spread over four years. Do the math, and that works out to be just over $500,000 per neighbourhood per year — a bit less than what the city’s works department requested last winter to hire six new enforcement officers. In fact, the annual cost of Miller’s new program adds up to a princely 0.1% of the city’s total spending .... Municipal spending alone won’t solve the problems for young people growing up in poor neighbourhoods, but it’s hard to imagine that what Miller plans to ante up will do much other than generate a few more summer jobs.

Now, Pitfield's:

David Miller made a thin promise yesterday — $28 million to Toronto’s 13 distressed neighbourhoods, spread over four years. That works out to be just over $500,000 per neighbourhood per year — a bit less than what the city’s works department requested last winter to hire six new enforcement officers. In fact, the annual cost of Miller’s new program adds up to just 0.1% of the city’s total spending. This amounts to very little for at-risk youth. Municipal spending alone won’t solve the problems for young people growing up in distressed neighbourhoods. These steps won’t do much other than generate a few more summer jobs.

This isn't the first time that Spacing hasn't gotten proper credit for their work - back in July, the National Post copied an article by Shawn Micallef into the paper without his permission, though that mess got cleaned up quickly.

As this article went live, Pitfield's campaign has just added the following credit to her entry: (Source: John Lorinc on Spacing.ca) . Now, how about an apology?

Update [October 14, 2006, 8:47 PM]: The plot thickens! Now Pitfield's blog is missing the article altogether. Luckily, Google's cached version of the page still shows the original blog post, without credit. Unfortunately for Pitfield, deletion isn't adequate damage control at this point.

Update [October 16, 2006, 12:18 AM]: The blog's gone now, replaced with a list of Pitfield's stances on a bunch of topics. Spacing actually got on the phone with Pitfield on Saturday, and she told them that "there hasn’t always been a clear plan of what to do with my blog...I have a young man looking after it. But I will talk to someone at our office right away." According to Matt Blackett, "There has been no apology or returned phone call. I cornered her at City hall during an election event. The closest it came to an apology was “I’ll look into this.""

You can watch the drama unfold over at Spacing Votes.