It appears that Elections Canada has forced the NDP to pay back $344,468 in union sponsorships for their conventions since 2003. This is the figure that Thomas Mulcair has been refusing to disclose to date, and which the Conservatives will use as more ammunition in the days and weeks to come.

Liberal MP Frank Valeriote stands by his campaign decisions with the robo-calls in his riding – but would simply have followed the CRTC rules of having the proper tags on the end had he known.

The Canadian Forces’ Arctic exercises last week offered us a glimpse of the secretive and mysterious JTF2 unit.

With yet more allegations of misconduct by staff in our embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark, there are concerns that said embassy is suffering from an “institutionalised culture” of said misconduct, as these kinds of problems date back to at least 1995.

There is a movement in the Quebec Election to get people to officially spoil their ballots, which I have some real mixed feelings about. On the one hand, protest can be valuable, but on the other hand, I am forced to wonder if the bigger problem is that people aren’t actually getting involved in any of the parties that they’re protesting against, and that this kind of disengagement isn’t indicative of their own lack of participation than the fact that none of the parties are pandering to them adequately enough.

Joan Crockatt has won the Conservative nomination in Calgary Centre, while over in Durham, the nomination was won by Erin O’Toole. And just to make it interesting, it’s a guy named Erin-with-an-e, which is going to confuse everyone in the Press Gallery from now on in.

Susan Delacourt looks at the culture of disposable leadership that has developed within the federal Liberal Party in the last ten years, and compares it to some of the parties, both federal and provincial, who gave their leaders an election or two to build momentum rather than dumping them after each failure.

And it was Capital Pride this past weekend in Ottawa. No party leaders and no Conservatives showed up. Three NDP MPs did, however – Paul Dewar, Dany Morin and Randall Garrison, along with a number of Liberal and NDP MPPs.