H5N1 Avian Flu has claimed a life in Alberta – someone who contracted it while in China and started feeling ill on the plane ride home. Health officials are saying not to panic as it has so far resisted human-to-human transmission, and those closest to the affected person are being treated with Tamiflu, but the fact that this is going on while H1N1 is back in the news in Alberta, where ten people have died there from that particular virus is certainly causing some alarm.

The RCMP say that they’ve identified the “mistake” that allowed those two activists to get onstage with Harper, but won’t say what that mistake was because doing so would be to discuss how his security operates. Senator Bob Runciman, a former provincial solicitor general, says that we need new laws to deter similar protesters, though “we need a new laws” always seems like the kneejerk response that everyone flocks to, despite the fact that it’s hard to see the efficacy of it.

John Baird has appointed lawyer and columnist Vivian Bercovici as the new ambassador to Israel. So yes, she’s not from the diplomatic corps, which sometimes happens, and she’s also a critic of Palestinian leaders.

The government’s proposed whistleblower programme where people can report tax evasion and maybe get a share of the recovered funds still isn’t up and running. And no, there’s no date for when it will happen. Because this government taxes tax evasion seriously.

The Sri Lanka High Commission says that NDP MP Rathika Sitsabaiesan was not being “politically intimidated” while she was in the country, and they instead accuse her of trying to embarrass their government instead.

Yet another exploding railcar carrying crude has people wondering when the government’s new rail safety rules will finally be released – though it’s hard to say how new rules could have prevented most of these accidents.

The failure to come up with timely recovery strategies for endangered species has environmental groups taking the government to court, as they say it’s not living up to its own Species At Risk Act.

Canadian airports aren’t too pleased with the Languages Commissioner, who has launched a social media campaign to raise awareness that passengers can demand bilingual service at Canadian airports. Apparently airports are concerned that people would get their expectations to be too high about the kind of service they’ll get. Um, because that would be terrible?

He may no longer be defence minister, but Peter MacKay continues to defend the Sikorsky helicopter deal, and says that cancelling the entire procurement and starting over would have been worse than the compromise that they ended up announcing last week.

Gail Shea says that the stories of “book burnings” at the Fisheries and Oceans libraries being consolidated are not true, and that only five to 12 people per year who weren’t in the department were visiting those libraries, so it didn’t make sense to keep them open.

Senator Vern White says that the Upper Chamber is an ideal place to study the issue of prostitution laws – and he’s right. It is, after all, a built-in parliamentary think tank that is more effective than a Commons committee or a Royal Commission, and far more cost-effective as well. Of course, White seems to prefer the Nordic Model, which will still keep sex work underground, which is inherently more dangerous and why the Court struck down the previous laws in the first place.

Alison Crawford writes that the challenge to Justice Nadon’s appointment to the Supreme Court could limit the places where judges can be drawn from, and affect future attempts at adding more diversity to the Court.

Conservative MP Rob Anders has another challenger in the nomination race – his former riding president, who said that Anders is hardly present in the riding. True to form, Anders calls his challengers “ in cahoots” (because splitting the vote is smart).

Conservative MP Patrick Brown has decided not to bill taxpayers for his trip to New York where he ran the marathon after all.

Mobilicity wants to be able to include its wireless spectrum, worth millions of dollars, as part of its sale conditions. Industry Canada had previously denied Telus’ attempt to take over Mobilicity because of that spectrum, as they want it to remain with a fourth national carrier.

Economist Stephen Gordon looks at the data to show that the fear for your job is probably overblown.

Andrew Coyne writes about the ways in which the courts and governments are redrawing the lines around the old “moral” questions as with drugs, abortion and prostitution, and looking at better ways of answering those questions than with the blunt instrument of criminal laws.

And a trip to the archives finds that Senator Mike Duffy once managed Canada’s answer to the Beatles, called The Great Scots. The more you know…