Visions of Turks & Caicos were abounding on the Hill yesterday, as premier Rufus Ewing visited to talk trade, and while no doors were closed on the subject of annexation (except, more or less, by John Baird), everyone had their fun. Even Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall decided to get in on it, offering to make the islands part of Saskatchewan so as not to need to open up the constitution to add an eleventh province, and PEI Premier Robert Ghiz playfully suggested that his island province would be a better fit. Err, except that Nova Scotia beat them to it by a decade, when their assembly passed a unanimous motion back in 2004 to have Turks & Caicos join them. Oops. Regardless, trade and security would be beneficial, where it could be a Canadian trade port to the Caribbean, and possibly even a supply base for our DART teams. It wasn’t all without hiccups either, as a Caribbean news site listed some complaints that the islands have of Canadians, and that they have no idea where Conservative MP Peter Goldring came up with the notion that 100 percent of the islands support a merger with Canada.

It looks like starting tonight, evening sittings will be in place for the rest of the spring sitting, meaning that MPs will now sit until midnight Mondays through Thursdays, adding another twenty-some hours per sitting week. Peter Van Loan also wants restrictions on when during the day that votes can be called, so that they won’t eat up time into QP every day, a move the NDP are calling lazy as it means that the Conservatives don’t want to show up to vote. Nevertheless, they won’t say how they’ll vote on the motion to extend sitting hours, due later today.

On the Supreme Court file, Peter MacKay insisted that all appointment made on the basis of merit, though one wonders why they were trying to push the Federal Court issue so far for Quebec justices. Aaron Wherry goes through everything we’ve been told so far about the appointment process, and also goes through the answers to the Order Paper questions filed by Stéphane Dion and Irwin Cotler, including the non-response to Dion’s question as to whether the government might consider a constitutional amendment.

Buried in the omnibus budget bill is a provision that will remove foreign ownership restrictions on isotope producers, meaning that NDS Nordion is almost certainly going to be sold to an American firm, and coupled with the looming decommissioning of the Chalk River reactor in 2016 with no ready supply of isotopes ready to fill the void of that 40 percent of isotope production in the world, it looks like another isotope crisis in the waiting because of this government’s policies.

Peter MacKay says that they won’t split the “cyberbullying” bill in two, which means it remains a lawful access bill wrapped up in the sheep’s clothing of protecting teens online.

Two former Liberal defence ministers say that it’s time that Canada reconsiders joining continental ballistic missile defence, for both security reasons as well as to strengthen our relationship with the United States.

Conservative MP Joy Smith is crowing that former US President Jimmy Carter sent her a letter to encourage her to help Canada implement the “highly successful” Nordic model of prostitution laws. Err, except they’re not really successful considering that their impact can’t be measured by police stats alone, as the Nordic model only pushes the practice back underground. If Canada adopts it, it’ll wind up back before the Supreme Court and struck down for the exact same reasons as last time, but it’s too bad that Joy Smith and her supporters can’t seem to grasp that fact.

Prison guard unions are gearing up to campaign against the Conservatives in the next election over what they see as the damage done to the system in the past few years of “tough on crime” laws.

Health Canada is beginning a six-week study on drug shortages as the problem worsens around the country. The NDP are declaring victory because of their private member’s bill that is supposed to help address the problem with proper notifications and fines.

The Supreme Court of Canada is currently weighing a case that touches on the issues of telecom data privacy. Being the Supreme Court, however, nobody is sure when they’ll actually render that decision. CBC compiles six places where privacy rights are being threatened by online legislation and surveillance.

Good news, everyone! You can use your electronic devices on airplanes now (in airplane mode) during takeoff and landing! Not that those five minutes at either end was really killing anyone – right?

The government has stopped asking certain questions with their surveys on their advertising campaigns, likely because those results are made public and they’ve been embarrassed a number of times in recent months over failed campaigns that failed to engage Canadians in any way.

Someone with Conservative leanings secretly taped Liberal MP John McKay griping about the whole abortion issue that we apparently can’t stop talking about even though there’s nothing actually to talk about. And McKay is a bit red-faced, and Trudeau says he understands that McKay has strong feelings about the issue, and there’s no real OMG DRAMA! moment here, so can we please stop beating this dead horse? Please? (Okay, one thing worthy of discussion is Aaron Wherry musing about the lines of what should constitute a vote on a “matter of conscience,” and the fact that it’s not as black-and-white as all those religious leaders currently writing to Trudeau seem to suggest).

And all of that Parliamentary Dining Room silver that was sold off at rock-bottom prices probably didn’t fetch all that much because the market for such things right now is at a low point, and there were no crests or identifying markers on them to raise the value – though some said that if the auction had been done better, it could have fetched a better price than the established process.