“But it’s freezing outside,” I protested.

“I’m asking you nicely,” he said, not so nicely, as private security personnel took a phalanx position, arms crossed, as if I were about to rush the human barricade, a rioter of one.

On the phone with an editor, who took undue pleasure warning that the Star might not have enough petty cash lying about to bail me from jail (editor humour), I joked it would probably be a better column if I were arrested. Little did I realize big ears were straining to overhear. In the U.S., the government can tap your phone. In Canada, party commandos skulk around lobbies, listening in.

Within minutes, that conversation had been reported to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office and a PMO harridan was on the blower to the Star, alleging I was trying to provoke an arrest, which would presumably make the Harpies look bad.

I’m not that clever. I’m also not the one who stage-manages photo-ops for the PM – he’s speaking at the political training conference tonight (open to media, because it behooves him) – or so fanatically wraps this administration in a shroud of incommunicado diktats.

Anyway, there were no cops, unless they arrived whilst I was out buying smokes (clearly, this was going to be a two-pack day) or having sushi at a nearby restaurant, listening to a trio of female conference delegates discussing the relative merits of getting blond hair streaks. (It happens to all Tory ladies, eventually.)

But what was under discussion, being absorbed by shock troops inside the conference rooms, while I was trespassing on no-reporter-land just this side of the front entrance, occasionally stepping across the threshold just to watch the sentries react, and because bossy boots bring out my inner brat?

Sample workshops: Candidate training, campaign manager training, outreach training, agent training. Agent training? Sounds like a mass exercise in political engineering for strategists and canvassers. Rather like an indoctrination program for the Watch Tower Society. But these are the new and improved Tories, no? An “attitudinal” change has swept the land, so that Conservatives need no longer hide their colours but wear them on their sleeves. (As, indeed, some participants were doing yesterday, with “Prime Minister Stephen Harper” sewn on their jackets, like a hockey crest.) Or, as one campaign manager told my colleague, Richard Brennan, this week: “There isn’t the attitude that we’re two-headed baby eaters.”

I saw one baby in a stroller yesterday and, true, nobody ate him.

Rosie Dinammo - The Star