Justin Trudeau admitted that a couple of errors were made in relation to travel claims that should have been charged to the Speaker’s Bureau he belongs to rather than his MP expenses, dating back to 2009 and 2010. He said that it was human error, repaid them by personal cheque, and said that had there been better disclosure rules – like his party has put into place – this would have been caught sooner. And then the partisan spin happened. The NDP tried to somehow wedge this into a kind of Nigel Wright scenario, which makes no sense whatsoever. There were also sanctimonious cries about how he swore he never used his MP expenses for his outside work – and it seems pretty clear that it was a mistake, where the claims were bundled incorrectly, but now we apparently can’t take his word for anything – gods help us if any of his denouncers have ever made a mistake before. Liberal partisans, meanwhile, note that the NDP are the most opaque about their own expenses, for what it’s worth. And for everyone who cries that it should be an MP’s job to speak publicly, I would ask where exactly in an MP’s job description is being a motivational speaker? It’s not. An MP’s job is to hold the government to account and to scrutinise the public accounts, though you’d be hard pressed to find an MP who actually does that these days – I can think of a mere handful. Trying to claim that their job is something else is one more reason why the state of parliament has become so abysmal.
Over in Maclean’s, John Geddes looks at the Justice Nadon controversy and finds some very interesting things about a certain legal advisor who joined the PMO as this was all erupting. This is a must-read on the situation.
So the teen with the pipe bomb at the Edmonton airport? RCMP feel that he didn’t really plan to blow up a plane, and his story is that he and a friend built some bombs to blow up a shed and he forgot he had it in his bag. And this is still somehow acceptable? The judge who fined him for the incident at least drilled into him how much worse it would have been for him had he been found with the device in Mexico, where he was headed.
John Baird went to Washington DC to talk to the Chamber of Commerce, and demanded that the government there give an answer one way or the other on the Keystone XL pipeline – a bit of a change from Stephen Harper’s “we won’t take no for an answer,” and as Paul Wells noted, is a sign that the Canadian government is not about to make any changes to their plans to accommodate the Obama administration. The White House, however, wasn’t playing Baird’s game and kept their silence.
The government won’t say how much of Health Canada’s $5.8 million advertising budget was spent on influenza awareness. Absent in the list provided of flu awareness measures was any kind of television campaign. But hey, let’s continue to spend money promoting the Jobs Grant programme that doesn’t exist, or the ads to bash at the telecom industry that the government’s own MPs have been praising on national television.
The CRA is consolidating its nine internal libraries into one national research centre to be located in Halifax. The usual consolidation processes of digitization, identifying duplicates, offering materials to Library and Archives Canada, and other government departments wee followed before anything was disposed of.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeal regarding the challenge to assisted suicide laws in Canada. Expect that hearing to be sometime in the fall.
The topic of doctor-assisted suicide will also come up during the Liberals’ policy convention next month. Also on the agenda are resolutions around legalized prostitution (err, it is legal, but the activities around it have been criminalised), but it’s starting to sound like Trudeau is wary about the proposition because it’s more complicated than marijuana legalization, and more alarmingly, he wants to have a “serious look” at the Nordic model – something which will keep the practice underground where the harms the Supreme Court warned about will continue.
Riding redistribution in Saskatchewan is going to make the province much more of a battleground in the next election.
Kady O’Malley looks at survey data that shows that the federal government’s plans to celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary – which focuses a lot on pre-1950 history – are out of sync with most Canadians, who want more celebrations of diversity, multiculturalism and youth. And while those things are great, and we shouldn’t neglect the 35th anniversary of the patriation of the Constitution or the adoption of the Charter, Canadians’ relationship with their own history is frankly abysmal, and perhaps a focus on that history isn’t such a bad thing.
A judge rejected a motion to shut down Helena Guergis’ defamation suit against Shelly Glover, Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton and private detective Derrick Snowdy. The defence counsel wanted it stayed until Guergis repaid the $124,960 in costs awarded to the defendents of her previous suit, for which she is currently paying $30 per month – which will take her 347 years to pay off.
Tamsin McMahon looks at Stephen Harper’s history of offering financial advice to Canadians – because he’s “an economist,” don’t you know?
Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson addresses the Chuck Strahl/Vic Toews lobbying stories, and basically says that it’s not her problem – there’s nothing in the Act that prevents them from lobbying the provinces, but they should exercise their own judgement as to the optics of it.
NDP MP Rathika Sisabaiesan talks about her experiences in Sri Lanka, where she was followed by government officials and the people she met with were questioned after she left.
And Prince Charles and Camilla are coming for a royal tour of Manitoba, Nova Scotia and PEI in May.