The story that grabbed everyone’s attention yesterday was the fact that maverick Conservative MP Michael Chong is set to table a bill that would amend the Parliament of Canada Act in order to give riding associations the power to control nomination races instead of the party leader, while giving the party’s National Council the ability to have a veto in place in the event of a hijacked nomination race. This would eliminate the party leader’s ability to threaten MPs that he or she would refuse to sign their nomination papers if they step out of line. It’s the kind of reform that many people have been advocating for some time now, and would remove a substantial lever that the leader currently wields. The bill is also rumoured to contain clauses that would require that caucus chairs be elected and have rules for expelling and re-admitting MPs from caucus, and that the party by-laws must allow for the caucus review of a leader. Those are more problematic suggestions, and the caucus review is especially problematic for a couple of reasons. Number one is that unless leadership selection rules are changed so that it is the caucus that elects the leader, the argument will be that they don’t have the democratic legitimacy to remove said leader – one of the biggest problems with moving to the “more democratic” system whereby the party membership elects the leader (or as the Liberals recently demonstrated, anyone who totally swears that they don’t belong to another party), because that system obliterates accountability. As well, the power to challenge a leader already exists within our system of Responsible Government, whereby all anyone needs to do is declare a loss of confidence in the Prime Minister, and if they can get enough caucus support in the vote – along with the opposition – that leader will go down to defeat. It just requires enough MPs to have the backbone to follow through on it. Paul Calandra insists that his party already allows MPs to have direct input into legislation, which I’m not sure is the point of the bill. Andrew Coyne thinks this bill can save Parliament, and I agree that the first portion would go a long way, but the other portions are more problematic and we should treat them cautiously.

Paul Wells writes about Duffy, Wright and Chris Montgomery to remark on the stark differences in the players in the whole ClusterDuff affair. The Liberals are asking the RCMP to officially probe the role of Irving Gerstein and the party in their ongoing investigation. Stephen Maher notes that it seems that only the RCMP can apparently be seen to hold anyone to account in this whole mess.

What’s that? The Beyond the Border initiative is beset with delays? You don’t say! It’s not like anyone didn’t see this inevitability given the way that the previous several attempts at “thinning” the border or creating harmonised regulatory regimes broke down, right?

A thousand Tibetan exiles are about to start relocating to Canada under a resettlement plan organized by Jason Kenney and the Canadian government.

The federal deficit ballooned in September, in large part because of the money needed to clean up after the Alberta floods.

Outgoing Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddard speaks to Don Martin about her ten years on the job (video). She has an interview with PostMedia here. Stoddard’s successor will have an annual paycheque approaching $300,000.

The government is looking for a company to provide social media monitoring services. While this may sound creepy, it’s more of a recognition that it’s no longer enough just to do mainstream media monitoring – which they already do – but that getting a sample of the kinds of conversations happening over social media are getting to be just as important as the columnists in the mainstream news.

There is talk that Stephen Harper may make his first official visit to Israel.

Senate Speaker Noel Kinsella has been elected the new chair of the Internal Economy committee, where Senate Liberals hope he’ll be a more non-partisan influence than the previous chairs, in particular Senator Tkachuk.

Laura Stone sits down with His Excellency the Governor General and discusses his role and some of the issues of the day (not that he really responds to the latter other than to say he’s paying attention).

Susan Delacourt wonders why the clamour is for abolishing the Senate, when it’s the Commons where Parliaments is most visibly being defaced these days thanks to the likes of Paul Calandra and his antics.

Aaron Wherry wonders about adopting some of the Standing Orders from Westminster in order to better empower the Speaker to crack down on the irrelevance that we’re seeing on both sides in QP these days.

Brent Rathgeber writes about Stephen Harper’s institutional responsibility for the ClusterDuff affair.

And as it turns out, Stephen Harper thanked Nigel Wright for his ethics advice in the forward to his hockey book. Oh, the irony.