After Jason Kenney suspended the temporary foreign workers programme for restaurants, Alberta restaurants are warning that they are going to have to start closing due to labour shortages, given that they already have a hard enough time retaining staff when the oil and gas sector snaps up relatively unskilled labour in short order. Kenny has said that more employers should try to hire Canadians, but that will likely mean raising wage rates. But will people accept the increase in how much it’ll cost them to eat out? We have become a culture that worships on the altar of cheap, after all.

One group of long-time Canadian international election observers has been left off of the list going to Ukraine for their upcoming elections, though they will still have another role to play there.

On the Keystone XL file, here’s the piece that Bloomberg wrote about how the pipeline controversy soured the “special relationship” between Harper and Obama, while energy economist Andrew Leach writes about the federal and Alberta governments are failing to do much on the climate file – which has become inextricably linked to Keystone XL – other than make some fairly vague promises. Paul Wells notes that the similarities between Harper and Obama are part of what’s frustrating the relationship and making things even more painful than they already are.

The legislation on reforming our prostitution laws is expected to be tabled in weeks, and it’s looking increasingly like the government will adopt the Nordic Model – which will almost certainly wind up back before the Supreme Court because it won’t be any safer for sex workers.

The Department of Finance has posted a surplus in February, meaning that it’s possible the deficit could be eliminated early. Then again, one supposes it depends on how much of this surplus is one-time income and isn’t once again masking a structural hole.

Despite working on the problem for three years, the CRA has yet to come up with any ideas for how to combat the underground economy. It doesn’t help that the agency’s offshore audit guide is dated from 2001, and there have been a number of changes since then.

Laura Payton looks at three roadblocks that the Commissioner of Elections came across in his investigation into misleading robocalls, and what can be done to fix them – only one of which Pierre Poilievre seems to be addressing in the elections bill.

Remember those ads for the Canada Job Grant™ that didn’t yet exist, and yet it was being portrayed as though it did? And how the government did a big ad buy during the NHL playoffs? It turns out that they tailored the hockey-timeslot ads toward men, as women would have been less likely to watch in their estimation.

Jennifer Ditchburn takes a closer look at just who Pierre Poilievre is, given the amount of attention that he’s getting these days.

Conservative MP Greg Kerr has announced that he won’t run in the next election, citing health reasons – he suffered a small stroke in January – but that he’ll finish out this parliament. Part of his decision to announce how was to give a future nominee enough lead-time to mount a campaign. Aside from Kerr, fifteen other incumbents now have chosen not to run again, meaning we really could be in for some turnover in the next parliament, which Pundit’s Guide breaks down.

The Eve Adams’ nomination battle spectacle continues, in which her rival claims that Adams has hired Jaime Watt to help her out, which Watt denies.

Samara Canada’s Alison Loat talks about her new book Tragedy of the Commons, which compiles the data from MP exit interviews, and most of them try to sound like they’re not typical politicians and blame the parties for everything, which really doesn’t help the practice of politics in this country (and doesn’t make those MPs look any better in my own estimation).

Susan Delacourt imagines a letter to the CRA cloaked in the language of the government’s Economic Action Plan™ propaganda.

And while I was away, I had columns posted on Lawrence Martin’s ridiculous lack of civic literacy when it comes to his suggestion that the PMO be stuffed with backbenchers, my comparison between QP in Alberta and Ottawa, and my take on the Supreme Court’s decision on the Senate Reference.