You just proved the point I was making.

There's a difference between holding a party accountable and trying to destroy them at the cost of good governance. There isn't any one party in Canada that's exclusively guilty of this 'thuggery', you can go back in our history and find many examples of both the Liberals and the Conservatives acting like thugs towards each other. The problem is when current politicians start using those past grievances as excuses to behave badly.

I have yet to see the Harper government apologize when called out on something that they have done wrong, and whenever somebody tries to call them out on something it's met with some variation of 'the real bad guy is [insert name of former PM no longer running for office] who [insert scandal, policy or past grievance] which gives Harper carte blanche to continue doing whatever misdeed he is currently being accused of'.

The conservative defense against Mr. McKenna's comments seems to be 'we may be thugs, but so were the liberals'. Unfortunately, this is similar to the defense used by the government when the stimulus spending scandal emerged (as pointed out be Andrew Coyne). Constantly using the previous parties worst excesses to justify your own is a sad state of affairs.