In the wake of the three by-elections, Pundit’s Guide crunches the numbers. While I disagree with the aggregation of the three events into a single grand number (for the same reason that I will remind you that the national “popular vote” numbers are a fallacy), the voter share breakdowns seem to indicate that the Greens were eating into the Conservative vote in Calgary Centre and Victoria, which further problematises the already dubious “unite the left” propositions. Because seriously – bundling both the Liberals and the Greens with the NDP as the “left” is too facile of an understanding of some of the issues the parties stand on, and one of the reasons why these “vote splitting” arguments annoy me. Colby Cosh gives his post-mortem of the Calgary Centre vote.

The government unveiled new emissions regulations yesterday for passenger vehicles a few years into the future – never mind that regulations are a far more costly way of controlling greenhouse gas emissions than simple carbon pricing. Meanwhile, Aaron Wherry gets a response from Preston Manning about his thoughts on carbon pricing – apparently he wants complete cost accounting, but that includes things like paying for the volume of land flooded by hydro projects as well as oil sands development.

The National Defence committee was actually trying to do their jobs and scrutinising the Estimates, and had the minister before them, as is their right. But MacKay kept objecting to everything they brought up. Transparency and accountability! MacKay is also obfuscating on the issue of reservists not being given equal dismemberment coverage as regular personnel.

Over at the Natural Resources committee, the Conservatives are trying to get Justin Trudeau and David McGuinty hauled before them to explain their comments as they relate to Alberta – apparently because the committee has nothing better to do. And in a lengthy bout of procedural wrangling, the Conservatives kept voting down any of the Liberal proposals to have substantive witnesses appear before them to deal with actual committee matters at hand. Because there’s no better use of everyone’s time than a partisan witch hunt, apparently.

The Canadian Forces are looking to get rid of four of their six Challenger jets under the rubric of cost savings, though it is more about the optics of fewer private government jets to fly ministers around on (though I’m sure that RCMP security details are swearing loudly at this point).

Senator Duffy is throwing his support behind the idea of a Maritime Union to help the Atlantic provinces’ economies through greater integration.

Econowatch wonders if Mark Carney’s record is really all it’s cracked up to be.

In the wake of the Rob Ford ouster, Emmett Macfarlane shows how the decision was the very opposite of judicial activism, while Adam Goldenberg says that his surprise at the decision was in the wake of how the courts bent over backwards to preserve the democratic will in the Etobicoke Centre decision.

Laura Stone has lunch with Senator Doug Finley, architect of so many Conservative victories, who is now dying of cancer. And it’s a damned good interview.

Brian Mulroney fears that social media is having a toxic effect on politics, as political leaders are bombarded from all sides 24/7.

Over in the Liberal leadership race, Justin Trudeau says he’s ready for whatever his opponents dig up about him. Meanwhile, Marc Garneau will be announcing his campaign today.

Here is your recap of last night’s political shows, where all of the parties declared victory in the by-election.

And the National Post’s Steve Murray takes a trip to Queen’s Park, which is an amusing and informative piece.