Given that it’s the big March for Life on the Hill, reporters asked Justin Trudeau yesterday about the whole pro-choice thing for the party (I’m guessing since it’s a fun game to try and catch the Liberals out on being a nominally pro-choice party with a few pro-life MPs still in the caucus). Trudeau said that as was decided by the membership in the 2012 policy convention, the party is officially pro-choice, that such votes would be whipped, and that the existing pro-life MPs are being grandfathered in, but all future candidates must follow the pro-choice party line. “So much for open nominations!” the commentariat cries, ignoring the kinds of conditions – or indeed groupthink – that other parties employ with their own candidates. And pro-life Liberals like John McKay kind of shrugged and said that it’s normal to have some disagreements within a party and left it at that. And now everyone else will try to make hay of this, because that’s the way it works.

On the Supreme Court file, Global learns that the PMO had encouraged Justice Nadon to resign from the Federal Court of Appeal and rejoin the Quebec bar after the July call from the Chief Justice. Evidently Nadon didn’t follow the suggestion, and even the former Supreme Court Justice that Harper sought his legal opinion from didn’t think highly of that plan, and the rest is history. Meanwhile, Independent MP Brent Rathgeber says that Peter MacKay should wear this mess as Attorney General, given his duty as the top lawyer in the country, and ultimately calls the move a petulant drive-by smear.

During QP yesterday, Jason Kenney said that the majority of temporary foreign workers in Southwestern Ontario are specialised workers who are there to either install new imported machinery or to repair it, so that the manufacturing sector in the area can continue, and that most of those temporary workers are there less than six months.

Kady O’Malley digs into the disclosures around the kinds of freebies that MPs get from Canada Post, VIA Rail, the Royal Canadian Mint, the Museum of Civilization/History, and so on. Liberal MP Gerry Byrne wonders if MPs should be getting so many freebies from Crown corporations if they’re in financial difficulty.

The Senate National Defence and Security committee has been studying the possibility of Canada joining some kind of ballistic missile defence program, like we rejected in 2005. University of Ottawa professor Philippe Lagassé argued before a Commons committee recently that it may be an idea worth considering if the costs to Canada are minimal, and the benefits in terms of intelligence-sharing with the US outweigh them.

The Senate’s Internal Economy committee report shows that some Senators are being given SecurID cards to remotely access their accounts from home in a secure manner, but aren’t using them and thus leaving their data vulnerable to hackers. The government and opposition whips have also signed off on the independent investigation that has cleared Senator Colin Kenny of charges of sexual harassment. There are concerns that the report didn’t speak to other women who have made similar allegations, however as those women aren’t employees of the Senate, the investigator wasn’t able to speak to them, so there may yet be more to this story.

The lawyer for the Council of Canadians during the unsuccessful robocalls court challenge doesn’t think too highly of the Commissioner of Elections’ investigation into misleading robocalls, saying that it was too narrow and that he repeatedly ignored facts.

A CBSA intelligence officer was fired for using her influence on behalf of a convicted criminal. And speaking of the CBSA, the third series of Border Security, with its ridiculously photogenic CBSA officers, is currently being filmed, despite the concerns about the programme early on.

A Montreal Economic Institute report says that the government should stop trying to interfere in the telecom market in order to try and create a fourth national carrier. Apparently they feel the Big Three are good enough, and that EU-style regulations to encourage competition will in turn discourage investment and innovation.

HMCS Iroquois has rust in her hull, which sidelines her from missions, putting our deployable forces even more into doubt. I think we’re going to run out of ships at this rate.

There are suggestions of possible impropriety in the Liberal nomination in Ville-Marie in Montreal, where party members received memberships without paying for them, two polling locations were used, and the winning candidate may have been positioning himself as Trudeau’s choice.

Energy economist Andrew Leach argues that we need a better way of evaluating resource projects, and discusses the merits of a kind of cost-benefit analysis where projects with negative social returns would be rethought.

Paul Wells writes of Stephen Harper as Shakespeare’s Henry IV, which is a great read.

And Andrew Coyne wants leaders’ debates legislated during an election, and more than one, so that they can’t try to rely on spin the whole time. The problem with said suggestion, of course, is that it really privileges the leaders and gives it the impression that it’s them who people are voting for, when it’s actually the local candidate, whom is not supposed to be a cipher but a fully-formed MP/MPP capable of representing their constituents and not simply acting as a drone on the leader’s behalf. It’s one of the reasons why the UK didn’t have televised leaders’ debates until recently.