Roundup: Live from New York…

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Stephen Harper is in New York to attend the UN, so of course that means he’ll speak to American media and reveal things he wouldn’t here at home. So we learned that President Obama has asked for more support in Iraq than we have committed at present, but he won’t say anything more than that, other than “we haven’t out” anything as to what we might send. He also started waxing about something that sounded awfully close to the need to find the “root causes” of radicalizing youth. Harper even said that our deficit figures are smaller than expected, though his Wall Street Journal interviewer did challenge the methodology on some of his claims about just how great our economy is performing. He even made some claims about immigrant voters, which can be disputed once you drill down into the numbers. Suffice to say, it’s more than you get here at home, which remains a problem.

Michael Chong’s Reform Act passed Second Reading by a giant margin last night, with the promise that it will see amendments in committee. The important change that remains largely undiluted is taking away the leader’s power to sign off on nominations, which is one of the key ways in which leaders have used to keep their MPs in line. Still, so long as party leaderships are decided outside of the caucus, any of the other reforms are largely meaningless.

The NDP has declared (grudging) support for the Canada-South Korea Free Trade agreement that was just signed. Not that it was the agreement that they would have wanted, mind you…

The government continues to dodge questions on the fact that they changed their story on the fines for railway companies missing their grain shipment quotas, no matter how many times they’ve been caught out contradicting their former declaration. Yesterday’s dodge was a declaration that Gerry Ritz is the best agriculture minister in the history of ever. Erm, someone may want to alert those who had loved ones die from listeriosis about this declaration.

The CRA’s “tip line” that rewards large tax collections has received more than 1000 calls to date, and there are nearly 100 active investigations as a result. No word on payouts just yet.

A new Chief Public Health Officer was named yesterday – the former deputy, who has been filling in since the previous Chief retired after suffering a stroke. He also revealed that we haven’t yet shipped those experimental Ebola vaccines to Africa yet because the matter of just where they’re going hasn’t been settled yet.

ISIS has been added to our list of terrorist entities.

There is talk coming out of the UN Climate Summit in New York that there is hope for the Paris summit next year, in part because of coal-fired regulations coming into places like the US and China, and because the cost of renewable energy has reduced by some 100 percent in the past five years.

Some people say that we haven’t been as tough on Russian oil companies in our sanctions as other countries have.

Laura Stone has lunch with RMCP Commissioner Bob Paulson, who says that pot smoking isn’t as big of a deal for him as it used to be, that he views the crimes related to addicts as a by-product of their illness, and that he is concerned with the Supreme Court’s recent rulings around warrantless ISP requests. Not surprisingly, Peter MacKay disagrees with the Commissioner about the importance of pot.

Liberal MP Gerry Byrne has made it official that he’ll be resigning his seat to run provincially. That makes three vacancies, with a fourth expected this weekend as it’s believed that Conservative MP Patrick Brown is going to resign to run for the leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives.

iPolitics’ Liz Gray-Smith shares a cab ride with Carolyn Bennett to talk about her time as an MP since 1997.

NDP MP Jean-François Larose has spoken about his own feeling gagged by his party leadership while he supports a former Bloc MP’s motion to try and give MPs more control over the agenda. He says he won’t quit the party, but one can expect that he’s going to find himself on the outs for the next while (not that he has any kind of critic portfolio or prominence as it is now).

Andrew Coyne throws some cold water on the hysterical talk about inter-generational inequality and conflict.

Aaron Wherry muses about accountability after the QP shenanigans in the past few days, and the diminution of Parliament by continually announcing things outside of it.

A number of people have weighed in on the Justin Trudeau/Sun Media boycott – Emmett Macfarlane, Chris Selley, Chantal Hébert, and Ashley Csanady to name a few. I don’t really want to get into this debate, but I will encourage you to read all four pieces, as they all have good points to make. Oh, and about the photo that touched off Ezra Levant’s onscreen rant in the first place? The participants vigorously contradict Levant’s characterization of events, as though that were a surprise.

And Paul Calandra went on TV to defend his behaviour in QP on Tuesday. Paul Dewar reacted.