His first day on the job, and the new Chief of Defence Staff says there’s not a lot of fat to cut at National Defence, and that they will likely have to go on the low end of planned procurements. Yeah, this could be an interesting four years.

Petronas has agreed to give the government another 30 days to deliberate on their takeover offer of Progress Energy, where I’m sure a tweak or two will be added. But really, it means another month of listening to concerns about foreign takeover rules that still remain unclear.

Falling commodity prices, lower than expected inflation, and lower than expected government revenues? No problem – the government’s deficit reduction plans remain on track, Flaherty says.

What’s that? The vast majority of the waterways still protected by under the changes to the Navigable Waters Act – and by vast, we’re talking 89 percent of lakes – are in Conservative ridings? You don’t say! Mind you, this could also be because the Conservatives have far more rural than urban ridings, but it is curious.

In the pile-on about Peter Penashue, we see that a number of executives from one corporation each made legal contributions to the campaign days after the election. Ooh – how terrible! Yeah, I’m not sure how this is supposed to be a real story considering that they did nothing wrong, and unless you want to start banning any corporate executives from making personal donations in case they might be de facto corporate donations, well, there’s not a lot you can do.

We’re seeing an increase in gun seizures at the border.

Louise Elliott takes a look at Jason Kenney’s immigration reforms to date, and how the changes to skilled workers and temporary foreign workers are panning out.

Kady O’Malley details the procedural tactics the NDP are employing to try and break-up the omnibus budget bill.

It’s a bit of a perpetual issue, but once again there are complaints that for the price the media pays to go on foreign trips with Harper, the amount of access we get makes us wonder if it’s worthwhile. And considering there’s a six-day trip to India coming up, this is kind of important.

Here is your Hurricane-Sandy-filled recap of last night’s political shows.

And Andrew Coyne makes some interesting observations on the similarity between Europe and Canada in that the fiscal and monetary union of each is not necessarily one and the same.