It was caucus day, when caucus is generally riled up as it is, and after Thomas Mulcair got into a bit of a fight with reporters earlier in the morning, it was likely that everyone was feeling pretty scrappy. Mulcair started off by asking about actions being taken to deal with a viral outbreak, to which Harper gave vague reassurances. Mulcair changed topics, and asked again who advised Justice Nadon to resign and rejoin the Quebec bar. Harper noted that he got legal and constitutional opinions before appointing Nadon. Mulcair noted the 650 lawyers and law professors demanding an apology to the Chief Justice, but Harper rejected the premise of the questions reiterated that he got independent opinions. Mulcair changed topics again, asking about penalties for rail safety violations, and Harper insisted that it wasn’t a matter of regulations but of criminal negligence which is now before the courts. Mulcair bemoaned that nothing has been done since 2012, to which Harper responded that they brought in significant changes to the system. Justin Trudeau was up next, and noted the failures on the Temporary Foreign Workers file, but Harper insisted that they were taking action and ensured that Canadians got the first crack at jobs. Trudeau pressed — to loud objections from the Conservative benches — while Harper hit back by saying that the Liberals wanted more workers. Trudeau asked again in French, and got much the same response.

Round two, Peter Stoffer, Sylvain Chicoine and Irene Mathyssen decried the money spent on promoting Veterans Affairs (Fantino: We use social media now and you broke House spending rules), Jinny Sims and Sadia Groguhé asked about the old data on the Canada Job Bank (Kenney: The Job Bank connects with Workopolis and we’re working to fix those technical glitches), and Guy Caron and Nathan Cullen decried the decrease in job numbers (Saxton: Monthly job numbers can be volatile but our growth record has been strong). John McCallum decried Kenney going to Ireland to recruit workers while Canada had high youth unemployment (Kenney: When I was immigration minister I went to plenty of countries and I guess for the Liberals the Irish need not apply), Judy Sgro asked about housing programmes in Trinity—Spadina (Bergen: You don’t care about affordable housing), and Kevin Lamoureux asked the chair of Procedure and House Affairs about the NDP turning over documents about their satellite offices (Preston: Certain documents have been asked for and some are quite thin). Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, Mike Sullivan and Matthew Kellway asked about social housing (Bergen: You didn’t ask me about this in committee).

Round three saw questions on the need for a national inquiry on missing and murdered Aboriginal women, housing on First Nations reserves and in Inuit communities, whether the environment minister has even consulted with her own community on climate change adaptation (Aglukkaq: Yay our real actions!), promoted tweets, actions against Boko Haram in Nigeria, forestry consolidation concerns, proposed tolls on the Champlain Bridge, the No-Fly List, and the RCMP briefing the minister on those Swiss rifles.

Overall, Mulcair was again scattershot and all over the map in his questions, making them fairly ineffective overall. Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, has returned to reading his questions quite obviously. Perhaps if he spent a bit more time in QP, he’d get more practice at doing it off the cuff, as he has done in the past. And once more, the Liberals spent questions holding the NDP to account, which is not what Question Period is for. Similarly, Candice Bergen may need a reminder that the point of QP is to ask questions to responsible ministers, and that she shouldn’t spend her time complaining that they didn’t ask her those questions at committee.

Sartorially speaking, snaps go out to Scott Simms for a medium grey suit with a pink shirt and striped tie, and to Laurin Liu for a fitted black dress with a white sweater with three-quarter sleeves. Style citations go out to Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe for a grey and muted coloured satin dress, and to François Choquette for a black suit with a fluorescent blue shirt and tie.