Jim Flaherty announced a “good news” economic measure of freezing EI premiums for the next three years – you know, like the Liberals have been hounding him to do for the past couple of years. Only, to be clever, the Liberals were calling them “job-killing payroll taxes” either, and despite the freeze, there will still be some rate increases. It also makes one wonder about the utility of the arm’s length board set up to advise on things like rates if the government continues to undermine them and set the rates anyway. Aaron Wherry notes that this was the subject of one of Justin Trudeau’s “crowd-sourced” questions during QP in the spring. When you crunch the numbers, however, the freeze isn’t worth all that much – about $24 per year for the average person, and $340 for the average business.

The former Commons Law Clerk says that he thinks it’ll be hard to secure a conviction in the Duffy-Wright payoff because it will be hard to establish just how either party benefitted from such an arrangement.

Thomas Mulcair says that the NDP will run negative ads against the Liberals in the 2015 election – and he’s going to bring up broken promises dating back to 1993! No, seriously. He also won’t say Justin Trudeau’s full name, because apparently if you don’t name him, he’s not a threat. Meanwhile, his wife, Catherine Pinhas, gave her first interview to the Huffington Post, in which she tries to soften up Mulcair’s image and said that he’s not the brute that he’s portrayed as, but that he’s a really sweet guy. Mulcair, for his part, blames the “Angry Tom” image on Brian Topp, even though he seems oblivious to his own conduct when sufficiently needled in the House and he blows his stack (which has happened on a number of occasions).

The publication ban on the Guelph robocalls court case has been partially lifted, and we find that there are witness statements that allege that other staffers named Michael Sona as being involved with the misleading robocalls, and that the Conservative party lawyer sat in on those interviews – which raises all kinds of questions, given that Sona is now alleging that said party lawyer was coaching those witnesses, and that they all got promotions afterward.

Conservative “strategists” are worried that the Senate could be harder to control now that there is no longer a minister representing them in the cabinet, who would coordinate their strategy with the government. While the government should never really be controlling the Senate’s actions in the first place (and the amount of that “control” – or ability to whip senators – tends to ebb and flow based on the relative age and experience of Senators in a caucus, and there are a lot of newer faces in the current Senate membership), I have heard from my own contacts that the Conservative Senate caucus is already talking about flexing its muscles a little more and coming up with their own list of priorities, rather than simply being dictated to.

While in Washington, DC, Joe Oliver says that the attempts to get the Americans to give emissions reduction targets as a guideline for where to go on the Keystone XL approval process is more about cooperation than concessions. Oliver also offered a reminder of the many ways in which our two countries harmonise regulations, which is true.

With the new facility for mentally ill prisoners delayed, but the facility at Kingston due to shut down nevertheless on schedule, there are serious concerns that these dangerous and mentally ill offenders will be moved twice – once to temporary facilities, and then once more to the new facility once it’s finally completed.

Laura Stone speaks to newly appointed Chaplain General John Fletcher about his being openly gay in the military as an Anglican priest, and the challenges and opportunities of that kind of diversity in our armed forces.

Economist Mike Moffatt casts a critical eye on the “skills gap” issue, and looks at why the upward pressure on wages that it creates is not really a bad thing.

And at the halfway point of the 41^st Parliament, Andrew Coyne takes stock of where things are on the political landscape.