Over the past several weeks I've been working with my friend Danyon Reeves on the new Bob Rae website, running on the oh-so-lovely Drupal CMS.

I've had the opportunity to get to know Bob and develop a friendship with him. You may recall last year, when he ran for the leadership of the Liberal Party, I produced a quick Internet video suggesting he would be a great Prime Minister. When he asked for help setting up a new website, I was more than happy to oblige.

One of the many reasons I chose Drupal for the software platform was Bob's interest in running a blog. He's already on Facebook, and as the nominated Liberal candidate for Toronto-Centre, he wanted his website to act more like a platform for interaction than an expanded political pamphlet.

This week, as we prepared to launch the site, Bob has started adding blog posts. We hadn't told anyone about the site, and until Monday, it was only accessible via the domain rae.openflows.net.

Yet, right from the beginning, someone was regularly browsing the site from the address gateout.pco.gc.ca, which is the Privy Council Office (PCO) in Ottawa, the part of the civil service that reports directly to cabinet and the PM (though not as insider as the PMO, i.e. Prime Minister's Office). This person in the PCO was checking the site so often that they ranked in our top 10 visitors, which included myself, Danyon, my mother (who was helping with testing), and Chris, the campaign manager.

Then, before we had promoted the site in any way, the Conservative Party issued a formal press release in response to one of Bob's first blog posts! You can easily put two and two together and figure out that this press release was likely either drafted by the person from the PCO who was reading the site, or else directly influenced by their monitoring of it.

The Stephen Harper government is terrified of Bob. They pulled all sorts of maneuvers to successfully prevent him winning the Liberal leadership, and now they're waiting as long as possible to call the by-election in Toronto Centre. They know that with him in parliament, they will have a highly intelligent and talented adversary.

I'm looking forward to Bob's ongoing blogging, and delight in the fact that I'm in position to watch the Conservative government rise to the top of our site's Top Visitor ranking. Of course now that the site is live, I encourage you to also check it out, sign up, and help out with the campaign. ;)