Canadian Border Services Agency president Stephen Rigby has some explaining to do.
Federal officials charged with announcing Canada's interception of the Tamil refugee ship MV Sun Sea, which arrived at CFB Esquimalt near Victoria this morning, blame Mr. Rigby's office for a major communications snafu.
On Thursday afternoon, about 4:30 pm ET, the federal government pushed out an email alert to the media that said Canada had boarded the vessel off British Columbia's coast.
But Ottawa was wrong. Nothing of the sort would in fact happen for about four and a half more hours.
Boarding a ship is no small feat and no minor accomplishment. It would mean the military, the RCMP and border agents had ferried themselves to the ship, scaled its side and begun assuming control of the foreign vessel.
Still, at 4:30 pm, the government shipped journalists a statement they said Public Safety Minister Vic Toews would be delivering "momentarily."
CBC TV ran with the news immediately. Other outlets including The Globe and Mail proceeded to report the boarding minutes after.
Mr. Toews then delivered a related statement around the same time - but not on live TV.
There was so little notice given of this move that TV crews could not arrange for live coverage of Mr. Toews' comments, which were delivered at the Winnipeg airport terminal.
Unbeknownst to journalists, Mr. Toews at the last minute omitted the portion of the remarks that mentioned the actual boarding.
There was no way for most of the media to immediately hear exactly what the minister did because only a couple of TV cameras captured the remarks. They did not carry them live and when they finally broadcast these later they did not air Mr. Toews' remarks in their entirety.
Sources say the Public Safety Minister at the last minute was warned off mentioning the boarding. So anyone who actually heard his statement in full would conclude the MV Sun Sea was merely intercepted and not boarded.
Within the hour, word began to leak out in Ottawa that something was fishy. Sources elsewhere in government called The Globe and Mail and other outlets to say the vessel had not been boarded but only intercepted. TV outlets that had recorded the Toews address noticed the glaring omission.
It took the Canadian government until around 8 pm ET to finally acknowledge the error - but only privately under the cover of anonymity. Officials roundly blamed the Canadian Border Services Agency for the mess-up, saying "errant information" had been passed up the chain of command.
In fact, Canadian authorities had intercepted, but not boarded, the MV Sun Sea sometime after 2:30 pm ET and the foreign vessel had entered Canadian territorial waters around 5:30 pm ET.
In a stroke of crafty logic, however, the Harper government declined to use on-the-record statements to set things straight.
Their reasoning was that since Mr. Toews had never actually said there'd been a boarding, he didn't have to correct himself. The notice of boarding had only been sent to media and not widely released.
The actual boarding of the vessel took place around 9 p.m. ET.
Steven Chase