Angry in the Great White North

I've read through the evidence submitted and cobbled together this timeline arranged against the CityTV transcript linked by the Liberals.

These aren't trivial incongruities, but significant discontinuities.

The alleged edit points break the recording into three segments.  Read each segment on its own:

• Segment 1: Tom Zytaruk mentions an alleged million dollar insurance policy after Stephen Harper says something that has been erased using white noise.
• Segment 2: Tom Zytaruk and Stephen Harper discussing the fact that Stephen Harper did not know the details of something.  The nature of the object of their discussion is not mentioned.  Stephen Harper is convinced that this thing is not significant enough to sway Chuck Cadman from supporting Paul Martin's Liberal government.
• Segment 3: Stephen Harper corrects some statement of Tom Zytaruk's that is not part of this segment, telling Zytaruk that the offer was to cover election expenses. Zytaruk accepts that correction.  Stephen Harper states that Chuck Cadman had made up his mind.

Decomposed along the lines of the edits detected by the audio experts, some things jump out.

First, the only mention of a the alleged million dollar insurance policy happens in the first segment, ahead of the first edit point.  In this portion of the recording, only Tom Zytaruk's voice is ever heard.  Stephen Harper was saying something but it has been obscured using white noise, so the context that prompted Zytaruk to mention the alleged policy is missing.  The mention of the alleged insurance policy is in the context of a sentence, and not as part of a question.

Using this decomposition of the recording, it appears that Stephen Harper is never asked about the alleged insurance policy.  Stephen Harper is asked if he knows about "that", but "that" is never identified.  Whatever "that" was, Stephen Harper was convinced that it was not significant enough to sway Chuck Cadman's vote.

The third segment starts with Stephen Harper correcting Tom Zytaruk.  Harper informs Zytaruk that the offer was to cover election expenses.  Since the segment starts with the word "but", we don't actually know what Tom Zytaruk said that required correction.  Zytaruk indicates that he understands the correction when he says, "Oh, OK."

In the order in which the segments are arranged, the recording is of a discussion of the alleged million dollar insurance policy offered as an inducement, a challenge to Stephen Harper to confirm his knowledge of the offer, his admission that he was unaware only of the exact details, his belief that the offer would not be significant enough to sway Chuck Cadman, and Stephen Harper finally discussing a different offer altogether, that one being to cover Chuck Cadman's election expenses.

Laid out this way, it doesn't make much sense.  What details are there to a life insurance policy?  You die, your family collects.  A million dollars is a great deal on money, especially in the form of a life insurance policy for a dying man.  Why would Stephen Harper be so certain that the offer was simply not significant enough to sway Cadman?  And why spend a minute admitting to some knowledge of the insurance policy offer just to then say the offer was really to cover campaign expenses?

If you accept that the experts have detected segments in the tape recording, segments that can be rearranged, and indeed have been rearranged, the questions can be resolved in interesting ways.  Here's one way to do without introducing new data:

• Segment 1: As part of a conversation that has been obscured, Tom Zytaruk mentions the alleged insurance policy.
• Segment 3: Stephen Harper corrects Tom Zytaruk immediately, telling him that the offer was about replacing election expenses.  Tom Zytaruk accepts the correction and thanks Stephen Harper for the clarification.  The word "clarification" is cut off as it occurs at the end of the segment when the tape recorder was turned off.  Tom Zytaruk has said that he turned the tape recorder off and on at least once during the interview.  Stephen Harper states that Chuck Cadman was not likely to accept the offer to cover election expenses.
• Segment 2: Expanding on the question of the election expense offer, Tom Zytaruk asks Stephen Harper for more information on how the party pays for a local campaign, and on Harper's knowledge of Cadman's motivations.  Stephen Harper admits he doesn't know the details of how the party would carry the costs of Chuck Cadman's campaign (we can guess that different arrangements are possible, from sending the bills to party headquarters and paying the costs directly to reimbursing Chuck Cadman only after the campaign is over, or perhaps some other mechanism).  On the question of Cadman's acceptance of the offer, Stephen Harper admits that the inducement to pay for re-election of a popular MP who had it in his power to avoid having to fight that election in the first place was a weak offer ("may or may not have been...a financial issue"), and would not work.  But his staff thought they could sell it, so he allowed them to continue, with the added instruction not to push Cadman too hard.   Tom Zytaruk thanks Stephen Harper.

Is it so hard to believe that someone messed with the order of the segments?  Forget about the edits and the magnetic anomalies.  The discussion makes less sense in the way it was presented.  Experts opened the door to the possibility that the recording was crudely manipulated, and in doing so allowed us to credibly consider the possibility that the discussion was different than the one we hear.

Or is that the probability that the discussion was different, given that the internal logic of the conversation seems to flow better if arranged differently.  Of course, in that version of the conversation, the question of an alleged bribe was quickly and immediately disposed of by Stephen Harper as not true, and Zytaruk and Harper discuss only the offer to pay for election expenses.

Not much to explain in that tape. 

Editing Update: Rewrote the portions of this post for clarity.  Re-read it this morning and I realized it could have been improved upon.  Fortunately traffic is very light overnight.