OTTAWA — Conservatives are not only supporting Peter MacKay -- a handful of them on the Internet are going even further in comparing Belinda Stronach to a dog.

The foreign minister's alleged slur against his ex-girlfriend has been picked up on a variety of pro-Conservative websites and many offer MacKay their wholehearted support.

Some go even farther than MacKay might have Thursday in the House of Commons.

"Peter MacKay should be ashamed: dogs deserve better,'' said Dispatches from the Socialist Gulag, one site linked to by the official Blogging Tories website.

The Politic.com, another blog listed on the Tory blogs site, said: "MacKay should apologize . . . to his dog.''

Yet another website ran a spoof letter from a group of dogs headlined: "We Demand An Apology.''

"In the House yesterday, Mr. McKay apparently referred to one Liberal creature as a `dog,''' said the letter, signed by The Doggerel Party of Canada.

"This is a slander on dogs the world over, as the former minister of complex files is notoriously fickle, attracted by shiny things, disloyal, shallow and generally only useful as a table decoration. As such, she is clearly a CAT.''

The websites listed at www.bloggingtories.ca have no official ties to the Conservative government.

But in recent weeks, the sites have run the same media talking points as those issued by senior officials in government.

And they have mounted fierce public-relations campaigns against government programs that later wound up being axed or downsized, including the Court Challenges Program -- a fund that paid for legal challenges that won new rights for women, minorities, the disabled, and gays and lesbians since the 1970s.