Shelly Glover’s paid campaign staff are returning part of their salaries in order to help ensure that she gets under her election spending cap. Complicating this are the fact that the party’s lawyer previously asserted that they were doing door-knocking for a much lower rate, even though there was never any indication in the filings that either were door-knocking.
The former RCMP national director says that a likely focus of the investigation into the ClusterDuff affair will be the source of Nigel Wright’s $90,000 cheque, and if it did come from party funds, it could add to the Breach of Trust charges. Meanwhile, the RCMP have spoken with Senator Patrick Brazeau’s staff as part of their inquiry into his expenses.
Aaron Wherry takes a gander at some of the politics of the Senate holding up the union transparency and sports betting bills.
The Prime Minister’s national security advisor saw fit to skip a secret meeting arranged for the various top government officials including the heads of CSIS and National Defence, to discuss worst-case global warming scenarios. Interestingly, the possibility of geo-engineering was also discussed at this meeting.
William and Kate have sent their best wishes to Alberta and the victims of the flooding there. The royal couple were there two years ago for Stampede, and visited the ruins of the wildfires in Slave Lake at the time. Speaking of Calgary, here’s a look at the kind of government assistance that is being arranged for victims of the flooding.
Maxime Bernier was caught driving with a suspended licence – though he didn’t know his licence had been suspended because of an unpaid traffic fine.
The seven Conservative MPs at the centre of that federal court case around their election results and voter fraud are now demanding some $355,000 from those who launched the suit in order to cover their own costs. The Council of Canadians, who bankrolled the case, calls it an affront considering that cases of voter fraud were proven, and the level of obstruction that the party engaged in during the course of the case.
Manitoba’s Attorney General wants the government to know that their lack of opposition to the (dubiously constitutional and wholly ineffective) Royal Succession bill is in no way a precedent for future constitutional changes.
Michael Petrou savages the current negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which represents a slow-moving betrayal of everything Canada and the US have tried to accomplish there for the past decade.
And Tim Harper looks at the five best performers on the Conservative front bench and wonders about their fate in the coming cabinet shuffle.