Mark Twain once quipped that, “A lie can run around the world six times while the truth is still trying to put on its pants.”

Which brings us to Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff and his extraordinary plan to “improve” the health and welfare of people in poorer countries by promoting abortions.

His comments came in reaction to a recent announcement from Prime Minister Stephen Harper that the G8 group of countries should focus on improving maternal and infant health worldwide.

Ignatieff - in his deceitful effort to raise the false spectre of the dreaded Tory “hidden agenda” - cavalierly labeled abortion as part of “reproductive health” services.”

Apparently he believes there is no difference either morally or physically, between aborting an unborn baby, and ensuring clean water, nutrition and better health services to care for women and deliver babies safely, which is what the announcement was all about in the first place. To Ignatieff, it’s all the same.

As a Harper official put it, the government’s announcement “has nothing to do with abortion, or gay marriage or capital punishment, in case those are going to be (Ignatieff’s) next arguments on this issue. At the end of the day, maternal and child health is about saving lives of vulnerable children and mothers in the developing word.”

In staking his claim, Ignatieff said that investing in women’s health is “the last place to start playing politics ...and ideology...”

Quite right. Except he’s the one playing politics and ideology with abortion. The Tories - or for that matter, the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois, both of which are predominately pro-abortion - didn’t stoop to twist the announcement into something to do with abortion. Nor did the Tories. The only one who thought abortion should be in the same sentence as better health care for women and children was Ignatieff.

Ignatieff went on to repeat the favorite lie from the pro-abortion forces that, in his words, “We’ve had a pro-choice consensus in this area for a couple of generations and we want to hold it.”

Not true.

The fact is, when the Supreme Court tossed out Canada’s abortion laws back in the 1980s - and attempts by then prime minister Brian Mulroney to rewrite them failed - Canada has been the only country in the developed world - the only one - with absolutely no law governing abortion.

What’s more, Canadians have never formally been asked how they feel about it, and polls have shown that many Canadians, especially younger ones, don’t even know that Canada is the most wide open abortion mill in the world.

Yet there is clear evidence to dispute Ignatieff’s contention that there is a “pro-choice consensus” in Canada.

Just last November, LifeCanada (an anti-abortion group, to be sure) hired Environics Research Group, one of Canada’s leading and most highly respected polling companies, to ask Canadians how they felt about the issue.

Guess what? More than half of the respondents said that human life should be legally protected at some time before birth. This doesn’t mean they’d ban abortions, just that, as happens in every other civilized country, the unborn should have some legal protection. Opinions vary whether that protection begin at the moment of conception (my own view) or after three months or after six months of pregnancy, but overall, 55 percent felt that the unborn should have legal protections, compared to just 34 percent who said the status quo is fine and legal protections should only begin after birth. Whither Ignatieff’s so-called “pro-choice consensus?”

But his partisan political tactics go even further than simply resorting to lies to make a point - which, truth be known, isn’t particularly unusual for a politician.

He is deliberately using, i.e. abusing, a sensitive moral issue in hopes of frightening voters into thinking that those damnable Tories want to impose restrictions on abortion not only in Canada - I wish that part were true, but, alas, it’s not - but on women in the poorer countries around the globe. We do know that some cultures absolutely ban abortions, so does that mean that Ignatieff, if he were in charge, would refuse to help the women and children in those cultures unless they changed their views on abortion? What else could it mean, pray tell?

While we’re on the topic, a report using 2005 statistics from the World Health Organization and others shows that maternal mortality rate was more than twice as great in South African as it was in El Salvador. Why does this matter? Well, South Africa legalized abortion on demand in 1996 and El Salvador criminalized it in 1998.

Ignatieff may want to look at that and wonder about just whose health he is claiming to protect by promoting production line abortions.

But then, why worry about truth when you’ve got a government to bring down?