The House and Senate have both risen for the summer, but as they did, Jason Kenney and Chris Alexander unveiled their massive overhaul of the Temporary Foreign Workers Programme. It proposes to try and make the programme harder to use, with ever-diminishing caps on the number of workers (who were a fraction of one percent of the total workforce in the country, incidentally) with the aim of getting more unemployed Canadians, as well as Aboriginals, new immigrants and people with disabilities into these low-wage jobs. But Kenney seemed tone deaf to some of the massive labour challenges in Alberta, to demographic issues, to incentivising labour mobility, to the problems of aging populations in rural regions that are depopulating, but most especially to the attitude change that needs to happen if they think that university graduates will think that low-wage jobs in the food service industry or even higher-wage jobs in processing jobs like meat packing are going to be the answer to their labour shortages. The NDP condemned the changes without actually reading them, and all of their objections were addressed, not that it mattered. The Liberals made some pretty salient comments about the implausible changes to inspections and the giant loophole going unaddressed through the youth labour exchange programme. The restaurant and small business associations are really unhappy with the changes, which hamstring their ability to find workers in tough markets. John Geddes starts picking out the flaws in Kenney’s case, including demographics and the notion that it’s likely that non-Canadians made for cheaper and more reliable hires. Andrew Coyne says that the changes are simply bad policy, which punishes the service sector where a government goes out of its way to prevent a manufacturing job from offshoring. Coyne notes that if Canadians don’t want to take these jobs, then they shouldn’t be artificially shoehorned into them, but rather to spend their efforts creating value elsewhere in the economy while those who do want those jobs should be made to be Canadians by using the TFW programme as a pathway to citizenship.

Somewhat bizarrely, the NDP are trying to make the Keystone XL pipeline a contentious issue in the Trinity–Spadina by-election. The big problem? While their local candidate Joe Cressy is advocating against the pipeline along with Mulcair, their local candidate in Fort McMurray works for Suncor and is trying to sound like a moderate on their oil sands policies. So is this another place where they have different messages in different regions of the country?

CBC has a look at the parties locking in their nomination races and wonders whether it will mean an earlier election in 2015. My guess is no, as I have been convinced by the logic that they would rather spend the summer putting out attack ads without the spending restrictions of being in a writ period, so that people are thoroughly saturated by the time the election does roll around.

The government is going to appeal the Ontario court ruling that restored the right of ex-pats to vote no matter how long they’ve been out of the country. I’m torn on this because I have a hard time seeing how someone who has been out of a riding for more than five years can know what is actually going on and who the candidates are. Sure, they may want to simply vote along party lines, but it does debase the actual nature of our system and is problematic when it comes to being an active civic participant, as they really can’t be, much as they would likely be participants in their new countries. But I guess we’ll see what the courts have to say.

Starting next year, visitors to Canada will be hit with a $7 fee to get an electronic travel authorization if they arrive by air – unless they’re US citizens, who would be exempt. This is part of the screening processes being put into place as part of the joint border security programme with the States.

Chris Alexander announced some $50.7 million to be given to the UN High Commission for Refugees to help with the rising number of displaced people in places like Syria. And no, apparently Alexander still can’t say how many Syrian refugees are actually on Canadian soil by this point.

In an exit interview, the outgoing Russian Ambassador to Canada says that the four years that Jeffrey Delisle spent spying on Russia’s behalf were of no actual strategic value, and that he was really more trouble than he was worth. But then again, of course he would say that, wouldn’t he?

Here is an update on the situation with Jennifer Migneault, the wife of a veteran with PTSD, who feels like she is finally getting some attention after her case became politicised.

Kady O’Malley looks at the flurry of last-minute Order Paper questions tabled before the House rose.

The Prime Minister’s Office has insisted that Mark Adler repay those donations that he collected at that questionable fundraiser held with those who had come lobbying the Finance Committee, of which he was a member.

And the government responded to an Access to Information request on the “cyberbullying” bill by redacting things like the word “Canada” on documents that are publicly available on the Prime Minister’s website. Apparently some words were exempted “in error.” You don’t say.