At long last, part of the mystery of the Franklin Expedition has been solved, as we have located one of the two sunken ships, and relatively intact as well, meaning that we can likely send divers there within the next few days. It’s caused a bit of a global buzz, and even Her Majesty sent congratulations on the find, which is lovely. While Harper is pleased as punch, and his detractors bemoaning that he’s spending resources on this and not other issues, it bears reminding that this is also part of our bid to map the ocean floor as part of obligations we face under the Arctic claims process before the UN. Not to mention, the Franklin Expedition has captured our imaginations for a few generations now, and it’s nice to see some answers will finally be found.

There were not one but two committees meeting in Ottawa yesterday. The shorter of the two was the Commons foreign affairs committee, which had foreign minister, the minister of national defence and the chief of defence staff come before it to answer questions on our deployment of military advisors to Iraq – just as things are supposed to work in our system of Responsible Government. The Liberals are asking for an emergency debate in the Commons on Monday, which may happen, but the NDP want a vote on deployment, because they apparently don’t understand how Responsible Government works and that you can’t hold a government to account if they launder the prerogative of the deployment with a vote. Our system is clever that way. Updates will no doubt happen over the next 30 days as things firm up as to how many are headed over, and what precisely their role is.

The second committee was of course the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee, hearing from witnesses about the prostitution bill. Much of it was what we’d heard earlier, like Peter MacKay insisting that the bill will protect sex workers, while sex workers kept saying that no, criminalising buyers just drives it underground and keeps it dangerous. That said, can we please stop bringing up either child prostitutes or human trafficking in this debate? Both are already illegal and are not the point of this bill. Also, if you think you can simply legislate away the demand for sex, well, I wish you the best of luck with that. It’s not like anyone hasn’t tried that over the past several thousand years…

As part of the new autumn pre-election campaign, Thomas Mulcair plans to spend less time in Ottawa and more time on the road, to show Canadians who he is. Because that’s exactly what we need – more people avoiding their duties in the Commons and denigrating Parliament in their absence. Way to go, everyone!

Mulcair has also revived the idea of a federal minimum wage, which seems to be more symbolic than anything as most federal positions tend to be heavily unionised anyway. In light of this Tamsin McMachon instead proposes a local minimum wage which is more responsive to local prices and economic drivers than provincial ones, which can suffer from distortions given the vast regional disparities in some provinces.

Here’s a look at why the proposal for a “YouTube tax” would be unworkable, in large part because of net neutrality, whereas the same kinds of cultural levies applied to Netflix would be doable.

An eminent group of former leaders, including former presidents of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Poland, Portugal and Switzerland, as well as former UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Louise Arbour, and billionaire philanthropist Richard Branson have been gathering evidence to say that the “War on Drugs” is a dismal failure, and needs to be replaced with more sensible harm reduction policies that will also rob the black markets of their powers.

The Russians deny buzzing HMCS Toronto, which is a likely story I’m sure.

With the Conservatives aiming to make “We’re better under Harper” as their pre-election messaging, economist Stephen Gordon provides some inflation-adjusted figures to put that claim to the test.

There are some Liberal riding association resignations in the Ontario riding of Brantford–Brant after accusations that the nomination process wasn’t open or fair, and that the one candidate was acclaimed when the association had others ready to put forward but had their cut-off dates blindside them. It seems that all parties still have some wrinkles to iron out with the open nominations, but hey, we’re re-learning the process, which is a positive step, right? Meanwhile, over in the Conservative nomination race in Whitby–Oshawa, there are concerns after the party bumped up the date of the vote there also.

Tim Uppal apparently had to deal with racist remarks from someone who didn’t figure that he had a job.

My column this week looks at the giant disaster that was the Alberta PC leadership e-voting fiasco, and reminds us all why we should stick with paper ballots.

And I have an op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen that explains why I’m not a fan of mandatory voting, since it doesn’t actually address any of the problems we have with our democratic system.

Up today – the NDP’s caucus retreat – err, “strategy session” – begins in earnest in Edmonton.