Remember those anti-pot ads that the government plans to run, which totally aren’t partisan and totally not about Justin Trudeau? Well, as it happens, they don’t show up in planning documents, and there’s no budget for new television advertising, especially for ones geared toward marijuana specifically. But remember – it’s totally not partisan. Really! And it looks like those doctors’ groups are starting to reconsider their participation, because they can see what’s going on.

After a meeting of an “ad hoc” cabinet committee on national security, Harper has decided to send two military cargo planes to Iraq to ferry weapons being delivered by our allies to the Kurdish forces fighting ISIS militants. We’re also sending a third plane full of “non-lethal” supplies for the military in Ukraine, apparently really getting good use of those planes we insisted on buying.

Statistics Canada released the right job numbers for July – up 42,000 jobs instead of 200. Oops. And yes, they’re “investigating” the error. Tamsin McMahon parses what it all means and the likely reasons for the errors here.

The Commissioner of Elections isn’t saying what the next moves will be in the case of the Guelph robocalls after the Sona verdict and the judge’s comments that he almost certainly didn’t act alone, and that Andrew Prescott’s testimony was largely to be disregarded.

The General in charge of Canadian Joint Operations Command says that the world could use some more diplomacy – something that it seems that Senator Dallaire also mentioned when he retired from the Senate. General Beare also talks about how the Canadian Forces were forced to transform post-9/11 because the world changed, and how it’s in the process of changing yet again with different threats than in the past.

The new “streamlined” and “efficient” Social Security Tribunal can’t manage its caseload, and it’s already created a massive backlog while it’s barely gotten off the ground. Well done, everyone!

The Alberta Federation of Labour says that the government sanctioned a large number of Temporary Foreign Workers being underpaid in 2013, under rules that were in place that year. Those rules were changed before the dramatic overhaul of the programme in June of this year.

People on Parliament Hill continue to keep editing Wikipedia pages, despite all of the attention it’s getting. And some of the edits, while not partisan in nature, are simply juvenile.

Kady O’Malley writes about the NDP’s summer of woes, while Mark Kennedy writes about the rebirth of the Liberals under Trudeau’s leadership, after they were considered the walking dead in the wake of the 2011 election.

Justin Trudeau’s former constituency assistant writes in the National Post that she was the one who sent him to that now infamous mosque in his riding, and she explains the thinking behind it, the fact that she didn’t have the information about its radicalism, and about Trudeau’s likely message about trying to make things work and integrating because Canada is too cold and isolating for too many months of the year for people not to get along. An interesting read in any case.

There are concerns that Senator Larry Campbell is in a conflict of interest because he’s helping a medial marijuana company get sorted in order to get a TSX designation in exchange for stock options. He’s not actually breaking Senate rules, and his position on marijuana legalisation has been well known for 20 years, so it’s not like it’s influencing it, plus he’s not lobbying Health Canada or the government. However, there are some concern trolls worried about the appearance of conflict, so it remains to be seen how this will play out.

A Winnipeg student wanted to learn more about the Usher of the Black Rod, wrote an essay on the job after research, and from the attention she got, the current Usher invited her for a private tour during her next visit to Ottawa, which happened this week.

And Sonya Bell and Jessie Willms offer 9 easy-to-follow rules for staying out of political trouble.