The House is back today! Yay! Oh, how I’ve missed you, MPs. Well, most of you, anyway. You can pretty much expect to hear talk on rail safety, Canada Post, more about the unanswered questions of the Senate scandals, and the budget within a couple of weeks (which sounds like will be a lot about damage control from last year’s budget). In fact, we could see a renewed push on the Senate issue if the Auditor General does release an interim report on his audit of the Senate’s financial controls this week as expected. Peter MacKay is also going to have a busy year with having to craft new laws around prostitution, and deal with the Supreme Court case on assisted suicide. Michael Den Tandt says to expect more of the same.

PostMedia offers a look inside the Major Projects Management Office, which is overseeing $230 billion in proposed natural resource projects across the country, coordinating environmental and regulatory reviews and getting First Nations to the table. It operates with about 25 people in the Natural Resources department, but as you’d expect, there are concerns that they are too secretive.

Kathryn May looks at the challenges of modernising and transforming the public service for the digital age, which is getting bogged down in the fight between Tony Clement railing against lazy public servants and fat cat union bosses, and those unions and their unhelpful “Harper Hates Me” campaign (which is actually untrue, according to anyone that May spoke to).

John Geddes writes about the angst that the provinces are having with the proposed Canada Job Grant programme, and in particular the fact that it would gut their existing and proven job training programmes that are helping the most disadvantaged that have nowhere else to get essential skills, while the Job Grant programme is almost certainly only going to help the big companies as small ones don’t have the time to do the paperwork necessary.

While Rob Anders has been planning on using his private member’s business slot to resurrect the crime of “rape” on the books, here’s a look at why it was changed to “sexual assault” on the books in the first place, and why restoring “rape” is extremely problematic.

It appears that established hiring practices, including a need to re-justify every hiring expenditure, rather than budgets themselves, are responsible for why it’s taken so long to hire psychologists and social workers for the Canadian Forces. This news, in the midst of what has been called a “suicide crisis,” is being called unconscionable, and one hopes that this kind of bottleneck can be cleared with the proper pressure.

What’s that? There are problems with the procurement process for replacing the Coast Guard’s aging helicopter fleet? You don’t say!

It seems that the total bill for legal advice before nominating Justice Nadon was $11,000. This is before the costs for their representations at the Supreme Court reference hearing.

The Correctional Investigator wants a resumption of the annual meetings with coroners and medical examiners around the country to discuss deaths in custody and how to prevent them.

Here’s a look at how Harper’s trip to Israel is resonating with part of his base – the evangelical community, who tend to be more attached to Israel than the Jewish community.

The various internal library consolidations and closures around the country have some civil servants worried about lost knowledge, even though most of the materials were either sent to National Library and Archives or other universities and libraries around the country.

As part of The West Block’s Big Idea series, former Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour says that Canada should come up with one long-term foreign policy objective that all parties can sign onto, like a commitment to helping countries develop their judicial infrastructure, which would go a long way in helping us to reclaim some of our stature on the world stage.

In Nebraska, cash offers for landowners still resisting the Keystone XL pipeline continue to mount, some now sevenfold increases over the initial offers.

Here’s another look at how the slap-and-hair-pull fight between the provincial Wildrose Party and Progressive Conservatives is being felt in the nomination races for the federal Conservatives. Sure, the Wildrose claims they’re neutral on federal issues, but are happy to slag off the PC members running for the nomination.

Brian D. Johnson’s farewell column in Maclean’s about the changing nature of celebrity interviews over his time in the business has some resonance with the way that things have also evolved when it comes to covering politics – everything being more managed, scripted, a loss of access, journalists being played. So it’s not just we political journos who are facing the brunt of these changing times.

Up today: Look forward to calls for an emergency debate on the situation in Ukraine, which Harper said that he would support.