Pauline Marois has managed to do something particularly spectacular – she turned Maria Mourani from a dyed-in-the-wool separatist who ran for the leadership of the Bloc Québécois, into an avowed federalist. Indeed, Mourani announced yesterday that she is renouncing separatism and embracing Canada, because the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is the best way to protect minorities and Quebeckers as a whole, as opposed to the proposed Charter of Quebec Values. There remains no word if Mourani will seek to join another party – Thomas Mulcair said that she’d need to run as an NDP candidate before she could sit in their caucus – but it is a pretty big blow for the separatist movement.

Canada Post CEO Deepak Chopra (no, the other Deepak Chopra, and no, that joke will never get old) was before the Commons transport committee yesterday, where he said that the Five-Point Action Plan™ was necessary to change Canada Post’s operations, and the sooner the better. He also suggested that community mailboxes were good for seniors because it keeps them active. Um, okay. Also notable from the hearing was NDP MP Paul Dewar throwing a fit, slamming his papers like the grown-up that he is. It was also suggested that charities wouldn’t face as big of a crunch from the increase in postal rates as they fear because they mostly use the ad mail programme, whose rates aren’t increasing – though their own mail volumes are also decreasing as more charitable fundraising is done online. Polling – if we can believe it – suggest that these changes will have little effect on Conservative fortunes, as their base is more in the rural areas and suburbs, where these changes will have fewer effects.

Government suggestions that they can achieve cuts in the Canadian Forces without affecting either the size of the Forces or the capital procurement budget means that the cuts will likely come from training and maintenance – and that has raised the ire of two former top generals.

At his year-end press conference, Thomas Mulcair insists that he’s not frustrated by Justin Trudeau getting all of the attention, that he’d be a good public administrator, and that the Northern Gateway is a non-starter that he would never have allowed to go for approval in the first place. He also admitted that he reads the polls, and praised “the team” for their “unicity” of message, which pretty much means that they’re good at reading their scripts and not going off on their own tangents – not sure that’s an admirable quality.

James Moore announced that the government will be introducing measures to cap cell phone roaming fees in the coming weeks, and to give the CRTC powers to levy fines against those companies who break the new Wireless Code.

John Baird thinks that Edward Snowden should surrender himself to American authorities because he’s done significant damage to national security and the free world.

The Conservative Party forgot to remove their Virtual Mike Duffy fundraiser from their website, and well, some people had some fun with it. Like this video, in which Duffy says hello to some familiar names from the ClusterDuff affair. Kevin O’Donnell scraped many of the names on the site if you want to try and find yours (though this isn’t an exhaustive list), and explains the process here. Scott Feschuk wrote about the RoboDuff emails back when they were first launched in 2009.

The Ontario judge who has been vocal about the mandatory victims surcharge says that Peter MacKay’s suggestion that criminals who already have nothing sell their possessions to pay the surcharge is tantamount to bullying, and kicking them when they’re down. That of course doesn’t obviate the very big problem of his speaking out to the media, and not enforcing a law that isn’t found to be unconstitutional, both of which are serious problems with the respect for judicial independence.

Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault says that Transport Canada officials falsely claimed that Lac Mégantic were more voluminous than in reality when they asked for a year extension on Access to Information requests, and that there was no reason why they needed such a lengthy extension.

Two big Supreme Court decisions are up this week – today it’s about lawyers being able to review police officers’ notes, and Friday it’s the Bedford case on sex workers’ rights.

A Federal Court judge won’t toss Omar Khadr’s lawsuit, as the government suggests, but does want changes before he allows the suit to go ahead.

Conservative Senator Hugh Segal says that his party shouldn’t pick fights with unions, because there should be a natural constituency of people who are concerned with economic growth and good management, and that unions have been part of conservative constituencies in Canada dating back to Sir John A Macdonald. Segal was also on CBC Radio’s The Current yesterday, which you can listen to here.

Stephen Harper won’t be attending the Olympic games in Sochi.

Newfoundland Liberal MP Gerry Byrne offered a lengthy apology after a deleted tweet in which he suggested that Pamela Anderson’s Hepatitis C was a sexually transmitted disease after her appearance in the province to denounce the seal hunt.

Paul Wells takes note of the Liberals’ ethnic-language radio counter-attack ads, pushing back against the Conservative ads and attempting to reframe the debate around drug policy (in particular marijuana), which is becoming a kind of shadow war that the mainstream in English and French Canada aren’t seeing.

Alberta Premier Alison Redford is frustrated that the federal government still hasn’t brought out their oil and gas sector regulations, as she wants to know what they are before her government goes ahead in reforming their own provincial emissions regulation regime.

And Andrew Coyne defends James Moore’s comments on child poverty, as clumsy and inept as they were in the face of a loaded question, in part because there are no federal programmes for school breakfasts. More importantly, Coyne notes, that poverty and child poverty rates in Canada are actually at all-time lows, which made the question he was asked all the more suspect.

Up today: The National Energy Board decision on the Northern Gateway Pipeline is due to be released.