Government House Leader Peter Van Loan is calling for evening sittings for the remainder of the spring sitting of the Commons, in order to get stuff done. Here’s a list of five bills that the government is looking to get through before they rise for the summer. And you can bet that the late nights will make MPs all that much crankier as the last stretch before summer grinds along. Get ready for silly season, ladies and gentlemen.

As outgoing chair of the prime minister’s advisory committee on the public service David Emerson said that public servants are losing their monopoly on policy advice to the government because they’re too slow and too reliant on data from reputable places like Statistics Canada. Emerson thinks that civil servants should get out of the “Ottawa Bubble” and look at all of the other information out there – erm, except all that other data needs tools like a mandatory long-form census to compare it to, which seems to have escaped him. There’s no denying that processes could be faster in the civil service, but the point is to give expert advice, not just telling governments what they want to hear because it’s expedient, and I’m not sure that his remarks reflect that reality.

Following concerns by Ontario’s privacy commissioner about the “cyberbullying” bill overreaching, former Conservative public safety minister Stockwell Day says that the government should probably take another look. That should be a red flag right there.

Flight attendants are pushing back at the Transport Canada proposal that their numbers be reduced to one for every 50 passengers instead of one in every 40. The one in 50 rule is actually the international standard, even though the flight attendants insist it’s a safety issue.

TransCanada notes that shipping oil by rail as an alternative to the Keystone XL pipeline is not as easy as it sounds, given the new rail regulations coming down and increasing costs. Nevertheless, the delays to pipeline approval are making this an eventuality that will be considered.

People are still talking about the abortion issue as though it’ll actually be something that plays any role in the next election. “Oh, but this is a very Christian riding!” insist certain Conservative MPs, though I don’t see them banging down the door to either move a motion on this in the current parliament, nor do I see them doing anything about those other Christian bugaboos like same-sex marriage. Colby Cosh weighs in on the Trudeau/abortion “debate” and declares that he made the right call, especially if you take look at the Supreme Court decision and notes why creating any kind of legal regime around abortion would be an impossible task, meaning that leaving it in the hands of health regulators is the right move.

The World Trade Organization has upheld the EU ban on seal products, calling it “necessary to protect public morals” around animal welfare – never mind the unregulated seal culls that EU countries engage in. Inuit groups are outraged by what this decision means for their livelihoods – they hunt seals more than for their own subsistence, but because they could sell the products into the market, the loss of which will devastate their economies.

The demolition work is now commencing on that historic farm that the government expropriated in order to expand the new headquarters for the JTF-2 special forces.

The widow of the American medic allegedly killed by Omar Khadr plans to sue him for a reported $50 million, which seems outlandish, and one wonders why she wouldn’t sue him for eleventy billion dollars, since she’s just as likely to collect as much.

Apparently a couple of Conservative MPs have been working on some handheld apps to connect with the SIMS database to better do door-knocking work.

In Oakville North–Burlington, Eve Adams and Natalia Lishchyna are accusing one another of misdeeds and each have audio recordings to prove it. The nomination vote was supposed to be this Saturday, but given the allegations, the party has postponed it until an investigation can be made. And so it continues.

Martin Patriquin follows up on the accusations of nomination race impropriety among Liberals in Quebec, and finds that they are being taken seriously and investigated, while another accusation of a would-be candidate stepping down after alleged pressure from the leader’s office evaporated as said would-be candidate insists he stepped down of his own accord.

Michael Den Tandt writes about the way that Senate reform talk has vanished from the public discourse, and how a plan like the one Trudeau proposed for an informal and non-binding appointment process is achievable without constitutional change, and could reform the institution for the better.

Here’s a look at federal MPs campaigning in the Ontario election.

And in case you missed it, here is George Stroumboulopoulos’ interview with Prince Charles.