With a growing list of international projects on child soldiers, genocide, research into PTSD, and two books being written, and a sense of the unhappiness of the institution at present, Senator Romeo Dallaire has decided that he’ll step down next month, around the same time that Senator Hugh Segal is also due to depart. Dallaire’s departure means the incalculable loss of one of our hardest working and most respected parliamentarians, and one of the people most deserving of a Senate seat where his wealth of experience has immeasurably been a benefit to sober second thought, policy development and drafting the expert reports for which the Senate is known for. Dallaire was also not happy with the way the suspension motions around Senators Wallin and so on were carried out because of the lack of due process, but hey, political expediency and all. And of course, the growing number of vacant seats is creating a bigger problem for the institution down the road.

The Senate Liberals held an open caucus meeting yesterday on the topic of oversight for security and intelligence agencies, in particular the bill that outgoing Senators Hugh Segal and Dallaire were sponsoring around a legislative oversight body for said agencies. In response to a question from Brent Rathgeber about partisanship and how all-party committees tend to break down into partisan circuses, Dallaire noted that the weight of the responsibility of the secret information they would be charged with overseeing would be a maturing process for such a committee, and Segal added that in the UK, such a process has been working for 20 years.

Meanwhile, we also learn that CSE has gathered and sometimes keeps Canadians’ personal information as part of their programme to protect vital networks from cyber attacks. That information could be kept for up to 30 years, which experts find remarkable.

The government has named Daniel Therrien, currently the Assistant Deputy Attorney General for public safety, defence and immigration, as the new privacy commissioner. The NDP says it’s not a good pick because he’ll be evaluating legislation that he helped to craft, so his objectivity will be skewed. Privacy lawyer David Fraser looks at Therrien’s record, and finds that Therrien’s focus on national security and intelligence files shows he’s a bad fit politically because he’s too close to the material he’ll be evaluating.

Peter MacKay is making conciliatory noises with Quebec on the selection of a judge to finally fill that empty seat on the Supreme Court. Aaron Wherry has a recap of the whole saga to date here.

While the government continues to pat itself on the back for its “principled foreign policy” stance around the Maternal and Child Health Initiative, which is decidedly pretty low-key, experts and observers continue to point out how little we’re actually doing, how we’re ignoring the issues around reproductive health and access to safe abortions, and how this is playing into the Conservatives’ 2015 election strategies. Others at the conference note that we’re saving lives for as little as $1.15 per day. Oh, and they’re keeping media away from the summit, because transparency and accountability, and all of that.

Paul Wells looks at the PBO’s report on the reduction in tax expenditures, and puts it in the larger context of Harper’s agenda – to make government smaller, and to ensure that it becomes untenable for future governments to expand programmes as they are loathe to raise taxes (and indeed all are promising not to). In other words, this will be his ultimate legacy.

In case you missed it, the NDP threw a tantrum yesterday morning about the Liberals voting to extend sitting hours in Commons for the rest of the sitting, and to limit when votes can be triggered. The Liberals said that they made the trade-off in order to get more time to debate, not to spend the whole time on time allocation motions.

The government’s military wish list around procurements for the next 20 years is supposed to be released next month, with some 200 items, as our procurement system remains terribly broken. The list is supposed to include timelines and projected costs, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on those predictions or calculations. Apparently it’s not supposed to be a commitment, but a guideline for industry to propose solutions. Have we mentioned the broken procurement system? And on that topic, the Davie shipyard in Quebec City is offering to build the promised new icebreaker now and for the original budgeted amount and not years from now at much a higher price as the plans are with the slated shipyard, which is not yet up to speed or even ready to cut steel. Davie was of course under bankruptcy protection during the shipyard procurement process and was largely excluded from the bidding for that reason, but they’re under new ownership now. Public Works says that Davie’s offer “isn’t credible,” so we’ll see what comes of that.

The Liberals are tabling a motion in the Commons about making fixes to the Temporary Foreign Workers programme.

Charlie Angus’ non-binding motion to call for a palliative care strategy passed the Commons but with one Bloc vote in dissent. Aww… And like these kinds of other motions that have passed, the government will pat themselves on the back and then ignore it.

And in the Christine Innes lawsuit against Justin Trudeau, Trudeau’s lawyers have fired back, saying Innes was the author of her own misfortune and that she ignored repeated warnings about her “aggressive campaigning,” while Innes dismisses the complaints of “anonymous volunteers” as muckraking.