A Federal Court judge has declined to rule on whether a three-year delay in an Access to Information request is “reasonable” under the legislation, saying that it’s Parliament’s decision to make, not hers. This could make the Information Commissioner’s job much more difficult, if she doesn’t have a proper definition of what constitutes a reasonable delay to go by.

Stephen Harper has announced that he will make a one-day visit to Ukraine at the end of next week, ahead of his planned bilateral visit to Germany followed by a nuclear security summit. Said visit would be shortly after the referendum in Crimea.

Among the many gems within the elections bill are an insistence that political loans all come from banks, which could make it even more difficult for some candidates to get into the race because they may not have adequate collateral or meet the banks’ requirements to get better interest rates. In other words, it doesn’t actually level the playing field like it purports to. BC’s former chief electoral officer, Harry Neufeld, says that Pierre Poilievre is selectively reading his report on electoral irregularities in the last election, and it is exactly what Polievre is doing. It should also be noted that actual voter fraud is nearly impossible to detect, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t happening either.

It looks like HMCS Protecteur is too badly damaged to be repaired in Pearl Harbour, and will be towed back to CFB Esquimault, where it is likely she will be retired.

In the Quebec election, Martin Patriquin looks at who might benefit from the near-collapse of the CAQ, Mark Kennedy notes that when he was a Reform MP, Stephen Harper thought that a simple majority was enough to decide the outcome of a referendum, and Stephen Maher points out that Pierre-Karl Péladeau’s fiscal record isn’t really quite as rosy as people like to think it is.

Aaron Wherry takes note of the Conservatives really trying to push that comment that Justin Trudeau made about “budget balancing themselves,” which only sounds silly if you ignore that the full quote was “If you grow the economy, the budget will balance itself,” which is not so ludicrous, unless the Conservatives are tacitly admitting that they created a structural deficit.

Brian Stewart writes about the mess that Western countries made in Afghanistan by pursuing their own agendas rather than actually working together for the betterment of the country as a whole.

Andrew Coyne uses the caucus disagreement in the Alberta Progressive Conservatives as a cudgel to say that those worried about the fifteen percent threshold in the (flawed) Reform Act are being shown that a mere one MLA can make a difference in starting an ouster process. It all sounds a bit overly dramatic, however, and ignores the other gaping flaws in Chong’s bill. That said, Jen Gerson’s column about how Redford was never really able to connect with the party’s caucus because she was chosen with the support of a mere one MLA and instead on the basis of instant memberships from outside of the party’s traditional base should perhaps instead be an object lesson for the fact that it should be the caucus choosing the party’s leaders, not an ephemeral instant membership to whom he or she has no accountability.

Susan Delacourt recalls the veiled voter furore from a couple of years ago, and how it seems to have faded away within the Fair Elections Act – which is actually a good thing. But considering that said Act is still based upon anecdotes rather than actual evidence of voter wrongdoing, it nevertheless is part of a disturbing pattern where facts matter less than anecdotes.

There was a stabbing/slashing incident between a drunk Russian diplomat and a naked Canadian Forces employee at an apartment not far from the Russian Embassy here in Ottawa. We have few details, but wow, this seems so very strange and messed up.

And Scott Feschuck reads between the lines of the latest Conservative fundraising letter, and imagines the lengths to which Harper martyrs himself for all Canadians.