After a bout of procedural shenanigans and two separate time allocation votes in the Commons, Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand spoke to the Commons Procedure and House Affairs committee, giving his assessment of the Fair Elections Act. He has a couple of major concerns – the lack of powers to compel testimony, the loss of the vouching system and the likelihood that it will disenfranchise voters, and inadequate paperwork filed by candidates who get their refunds nevertheless. He spoke about the privacy concerns over turning over the lists of who actually voted over to the parties, who have zero legislated privacy safeguards, and said that the fears of voter information cards to commit fraud is a lot of sound and fury over nothing as most of the errors recorded were procedural and not substantive. In case you couldn’t guess, Pierre Poilieve shrugged off most of the whole appearance, and tried to claim that Mayrand made a number of factual errors.
Word has it that Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair met to discuss the Quebec election, which makes a fair bit of sense given Mulcair’s experience in provincial politics there. Paul Wells discusses the meaning of it all, and the need for federalist leaders both provincially and federally to stay on good terms in the event that the PQ wins and start agitating toward a new referendum.
Over in Ukraine, the Crimean parliament has voted to secede from the country and join Russia, and will hold a referendum next week on the subject – one which the US and Canada rejects. Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland is in Kyiv meeting with various players, and is struck by the importance of Canada’s voice in the country. Paul Wells looks at the false notion of Obama’s “weakness” on the Ukraine file, and points to the ways in which Harper has helped Putin in the past, and ways in which their efforts to date have been “exquisitely useless.”
Ruh-roh! The Plans and Priorities report for Veterans Affairs admits that the recent changes to the department may mean poorer quality service for veterans and that some needs won’t be met.
The military is looking to tout the success of their Joint Personnel Support Units in helping injured veterans in either returning to duty or transitioning successfully to civilian life, but there are criticisms that they are woefully under-resourced for the demands placed upon them.
The head of air command in the US has admitted that the F-35s are irrelevant without upgraded F-22 fighters to accompany them, because they’re not air superiority fighters. And the US has banned the sale of F-22s to any foreign country. Oh, but Lockheed Martin Canada says that the F-35s will still suit Canada’s needs just fine, which gets harder and harder to believe by the day (especially given the whole single-engine issue).
Plans to expand women’s correctional institutes around the country includes more mother-child spaces, which the courts have gone so far as to call a Charter right.
Both FINTRAC and Library and Archives Canada are having a hard time managing the deluge of information that each receives, and need IT systems upgrades to help cope.
An associate deputy minister at Public Works has received the civil service’s top honours for her work in modernizing the government’s pay and pension systems.
MPs are getting a pay increase on April 1st. Everybody freak out! Ready the cheap outrage!
It sounds like we’re closing in on a free trade deal with South Korea after a decade of talks – not that there isn’t still wailing and gnashing of teeth over the whole issue of the auto sector.
In case you’ve forgotten, it’s been eight months since we’ve had an American ambassador in place, and even though Obama’s candidate has been confirmed, he’s still not installed here in Ottawa.
Laura Stone talked to David Christopherson about the art of the filibuster. Whether the government really lived up to the spirit of their end of the bargain in ending said filibuster is, of course, another matter.
A rambling Jim Flaherty suggested that Justin Trudeau find leprechauns and their pots of gold if he thinks that budgets balance themselves. Tempers flared in QP over the reports on the issue of missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Then Paul Calandra and Nathan Cullen got into a shouting match after doing TV panels together, where nasty things were apparently said (while Cullen insists it was out of the blue. Hmmm…) Suffice to say, it’s a good thing they’re all going away for two weeks.
And with news that the CRTC is concerned that certain adult-themed channels don’t have enough Canadian content on them, Jonathan Kay takes a stab at writing CRTC-approved gay porn. It’s fantastic.
PS – Check out the new Maclean’s website. So pretty!
Freak out? Cheap outrage over salary raises for MPs? Nothing cheap about it while wages in Canada are being driven down by those very same people. They tell us to be mature and accept cuts in pensions and wages, scrap universal health care and go without. Why don’t these MPs lead by example and not give themselves a raise? Or better still, a salary cut.