Minister of State for Finance Ted Menzies has announced that he won’t be running in 2015, and has taken him out of the running in the upcoming cabinet shuffle. With Vic Toews’ resignation said to be imminent (and I’ve heard this from caucus sources), this is likely the first of a number of such announcements to be made in the coming couple of weeks. It remains to be speculated if Menzies decision is a genuine desire to move on, of if this isn’t a face-saving exit with political capital intact if he was told that he wasn’t getting back in. Nevertheless, this fuels the shuffle speculation fire in the coming weeks.

On the topic of shuffle speculation, Maclean’s Econowatch grades Jim Flaherty’s performance on a variety of metrics. The Hill Times has yet more cabinet speculation here.

The RCMP have thwarted an alleged terror attack at the BC legislature. They have deemed this a domestic, self-radicalised incident with no international links, though they also declared the two suspects to be “al-Qaeda inspired.”

While neither the Receiver General nor the Senate financial office would make Senator Mike Duffy’s $90,000 repayment cheque public, incoming chair of the Senate internal economy committee Senator Comeau says that he has seen it. Duffy, however, won’t provide a copy of the cheque he got from Nigel Wright. The Senate, meanwhile, is now looking at getting a court order in order to begin garnishing the wages of Senators Patrick Brazeau and Mac Harb, as neither have repayed their expenses as ordered.

Liberal Senate leader James Cowan explains what went down with C-377, and why people who say the Senate shouldn’t amend bills because they don’t have the “democratic legitimacy” are wrong.

Here’s a look at what it means now that Sable Island is a national park reserve.

It seems that CBSA has quietly dropped the end-use certificate requirement for retailers to keep iPods tariff-exempt, but ambiguity still remains around those tariff rules and the so-called “iPod tax.”

CBC has a lengthy look at the issue of unpaid internships, which Liberal MP Scott Brison has been raising the alarm about, especially as they are not tracked an monitored by the government by way of Statistics Canada or any other labour force measures.

A Fisheries and Oceans report warns of the problem of increased ocean acidification caused by higher CO2 levels, and how that impacts the Arctic Ocean.

Our embassy in Cairo has been closed over security concerns.

Canadian Lawyer Magazine interviews Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, and talks about consensus building on the court, and includes a number of other voices commenting on the McLachlin era and the notion of how consensus plays out in judicial decisions.

Here’s an interview by The Agenda with Bob Rae on his departure from politics.

And Conservative MP Peter Goldring continues the quest to bring Turks and Caicos into confederation. Bless him.