The first of the 2014 budget implementation omnibus bills has now been tabled, and this one is only about 359 pages long. Included in its many, many pages are provisions relating to aligning trademark rules to match international regulations, changes to the temporary foreign workers programme when it comes to better enforcement mechanisms, formalizing the reintroduction of the “royal” titles to the Royal Canadian Airforce and Royal Canadian Navy, capping domestic roaming rates for wireless calls, keeping suspended MPs and Senators from accruing pension benefits, adding new Superior Court judges in Alberta and Quebec, funding the Champlain Bridge replacement (*drink!*), and implementing a controversial tax-sharing agreement with the US, to name but a few (more items here, while you can find the whole bill posted here.

In other budget-related news, the finance department has posted a tiny surplus for the second month in a row. They’re turning the corner on the deficit ahead of schedule – but at the cost of complaints that the cuts to departments are too fast and without any coherent plans.

Plans to replace our thirty-year-old Aurora surveillance aircraft were deemed unaffordable, so the Royal Canadian Air Force plans to upgrade 14 of them to keep them flying until 2030. They had originally asked for 18 to be upgraded to ensure proper surveillance coverage of our coastlines, but that was nixed as well. But hey, the military has all the money it needs, remember?

While a Private Member’s Bill seeks to take away the power from prison wardens to grant escorted day releases, the head of Corrections Canada has come out against it, saying that these kinds of releases are essential to integrating these inmates back into society. Never mind that 99 percent of these go on without problem, and are useful to assess the suitability of granting day parole. The Conservative worldview is largely once a criminal, always a criminal, and the key is to be thrown away once locked up.

It sounds like the government will actually start to pay for service dogs for veterans with PTSD.

Residential School survivors are being notified of the possible privacy breach of their records.

The military wanted a “fitting tribute” to Peter MacKay after the cabinet shuffle, and a reception was held that cost taxpayers $1600. Oh noes! Here come the mongers of cheap outrage, with cries of misplaced priorities and being out of touch!

With everyone making lame jokes about the Conservatives pulling job data from Kijiji, Susan Delacourt sees it as part of a pattern for a government that prefers anecdotes to hard data, while they paradoxically scoop up as much data as possible for their voter identification database.

The revelations continue to dog former Alberta premier Alison Redford, as they are now reporting that she ordered a penthouse suite in the provincially-owned Federal Building under renovation in Edmonton, and that her personal assistant ordered the changes.  (Those plans were since cancelled and two boardrooms are now being constructed in that space). Meanwhile, the price tag for all of her staff’s severance packages is over $1.3 million.

In nominations news, Eve Adams is being accused of misusing parliamentary resources by sending out householder mailouts to the riding she wants to move into (the current MP for part of that riding, pre-redistribution, is Lisa Raitt), while the fallout over the whole nomination craziness has seen the party’s regional director get fired over the whole thing. Over in Calgary, Rob Anders has apologised for a “mix-up” when he labelled a number of people “temporary Tories” when they were not the people he thought they were. Oops. (But there’s still a conspiracy and a fight for the soul of the party, remember!)

Megan Leslie is defending herself against the accusations of poor judgement for allowing Truthers to post on her community page on her website.

Stephen Maher chronicles the downward spiral of suspended Senator Patrick Brazeau since his boxing match with Justin Trudeau, and goes back to his days at the Congress of Aboriginal People where he was already a controversial figure that the PMO apparently didn’t spend enough time looking over in their rushed vetting process.

And Andrew Coyne laments the ways in which the current government is behaving abnormally in their insistence that this election law be rammed through, as flawed as it clearly is.