A senior Conservative official resigned Tuesday after admitting he plagiarized almost half a speech Stephen Harper made urging Canada to send troops into Iraq.

Owen Lippert, a strategist in the party's campaign ahead of a federal election Oct. 14, said he had been pressed for time and was overzealous in copying segments of another world leader's speech.

He said none of his superiors, including Prime Minister Harper, who was leader of the opposition Canadian Alliance at the time, knew what he had done.

Harper's speech before the House of Commons on March 20, 2003 -- the day of the Iraq invasion by a multinational coalition composed of U.S. and British troops supported by Australian, Danish and Polish contingents -- included a word-for-word recitation of a speech Australian Prime Minister John Howard delivered a day and a half before, Liberal Foreign Affairs Critic Bob Rae said Tuesday.

Side-by-side videos of the speeches, posted on the Liberal Party of Canada's Web site, show significant portions of the speeches were identical, a UPI review found.

How does a leader in Canada's Parliament, on such a crucial issue, end up giving almost the exact same speech as any another country's leader, let alone a leader who was a key member of George W. Bush's Coalition of the Willing? Rae said.

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, a Liberal, did the right thing and said no to mounting U.S. pressure to send troops to Iraq, Rae said in Toronto.

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