Lisa Raitt wants CP Rail employees to voluntarily return to work before the back-to-work legislation passes, seeing as that awful Senate won’t violate all of their own rules in order to bend to her whims. How horrible is it for Parliament to have rules to be follows? Why do Parliament’s rules hate the economy?

It turns out that the severed hand found at the Canada Post depot in Ottawa yesterday was bound for Liberal party headquarters – not that there was any political motive. It looks like the suspect in this case was just a deranged and narcissistic individual, and nothing attracts the crazy like politics. More about the increasingly bizarre and gruesome tale can be found here.

On a lighter note, Jennifer Ditchburn looks at some other odd mail that MPs and Senators get, which include these wooden churches.

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver went on television last night to say that the tailings ponds in Alberta will one day be so clean that you could drink out of them. Well, one day, maybe, when the miraculous technology exists. Maybe. That miraculous technology may also magically take carbon out of the atmosphere as well for all we know, because it belongs in a science fiction future world. Oliver also insists that the landscape will be restored to a pristine state of boreal forest. Which would be all well and good if the oil sands were primarily under boreal forest, which they’re not. They’re largely under muskeg and peat bog, which is something we can’t actually restore. Things to keep in mind.

Vic Toews promises new legislation to update RCMP disciplinary procedures so that they can actually weed out “bad apples” from the Force in a meaningful way. No word, however, on when that will happen, other than it’ll likely be in the fall given the Commons calendar in the next few weeks.

What’s that? All of the money being spent to enforce the “zero tolerance” on drugs in prisons is yielding precious few results? You don’t say!

Stephen Harper announced the creation of a Hunting and Angling Advisory Panel, as it seems that “conservation” is going to replace environmental legislation.

Here’s a look at that private members’ bill on knocking down interprovincial barriers on wine that everyone was so concerned about yesterday. But good luck getting it past the Senate before the summer break, considering the committee it’ll be headed to is going to be busy with the omnibus budget right until they rise for the summer.

Here’s a look at the progress of the study of the omnibus budget bill in committee.

And here’s a sweet tale about how Michelle Rempel and Megan Leslie are actually really friendly outside of the House, if only to remind you that sometimes it’s really just politics and not personal.