Jim Flaherty’s state funeral yesterday attracted some of the biggest names in politics, current and former leaders on both sides of the aisles both provincially and federally (video here). Everyone wore something green, be it a tie or a scarf, to give a nod to Flaherty’s particular sartorial trademark. Harper’s eulogy was largely lauded, especially for the humour he showed that almost never appears in his public persona here in Ottawa, which is really too bad. There are stories about his self-depricating jokes at Press Gallery Dinners past, before he became Prime Minister and made it a personal policy to not only not attend, but also remove any trace of humanity from any speech he gives. That certain other party leaders plan to use their knack for human engagement as a wedge against Harper makes one wonder about its use as a strategic decision all along.

Sources are telling Global News that the RCMP investigation into suspended senator Mike Duffy is now complete, and charges will formally be laid within a month. One has to wonder how much testimony Nigel Wright gave regarding Duffy as part of the investigation, and how much he’ll be expected to testify in the future.

As for Wright, Chris Hall writes about the remaining pieces of the whole ClusterDuff puzzle that we’re still waiting for answers on. Andrew Coyne notes that Wright not being charged doesn’t make the scandal go away, and we are still left with the huge unanswered question as to just why the government went to such lengths to protect Duffy and pay his expenses rather than requiring he do it himself.

Police have charged a 19-year-old man in London, Ontario, with the theft of those 900 SINs from the CRA servers using the Heartbleed Bug vulnerability. Apparently the speed of which they were able to track him means that his level of skill as a hacker wasn’t all that advanced. CSE apparently knew about the Heartbleed Bug vulnerability a full day before CRA shut their site down, and it makes one wonder if the shutdown was unnecessarily delayed and could have avoided the hacker’s attack if they’d acted sooner.

The Liberal Party is looking to appoint two ombudspersons to help resolve any nomination race disputes going forward, but the power to greenlight will apparently still stay with the leader (based on these ombudspersons’ recommendations) and likely wouldn’t have done anything to prevent the Trinity–Spadina mess.

Speaking of Liberal nomination races, the party quietly closed nominations in the new riding of University­–Rosedale in Toronto, meaning that Chrystia Freeland will be the candidate by acclamation in 2015. There are a number of other Liberal ridings with incumbents that will also go uncontested, which is discouraging for local democracy, and mystifying when there’s a year-and-a-half until the next election.

Jennifer Ditchburn digs into the issue of the Information Commissioner’s fight to try to gain access to records in ministerial offices.

Former US President Jimmy Carter signed a letter against the Keystone XL Pipeline, which triggered a rebuke from the PMO, reminding him of the energy crisis in 1979 and the lack of stable oil supplies that America could depend on. Not that Canada was of great help to the American oil crisis then, what with our export taxes on energy and nationalizing our resources, but hey, details/revisionist history.

As NATO starts talking about plans to beef up its presence in Eastern Europe, Canada’s presence is noticeably absent, even though adding some CF-18s or deploying a frigate to the area would make a big statement without costing too much money.

Colin Horgan notes that the problems with the Fair Elections Act rest ultimately with the government’s insistence on playing populist games with the bill and its constant need to dismiss the testimony of experts in favour of anecdotes and gut feelings, which has taken our political discourse to the very depths. Mind you, the problem with most of the things this government does is populism…and the kind of pandering that certain other opposition parties engages in as well, so really, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that populism really is poisoning our democratic discourse.

And congratulations to Paul Wells for winning the Dafoe Prize for his book The Longer I’m Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006–.