If you listen to the government and their spokespeople, the problems at Veterans Affairs don’t have to do with management or resources, but rather that they’re simply not communicating their programmes effectively to newer veterans. At least, that’s the argument that Conservative parliamentary secretary Erin O’Toole was trying to put forward on the weekend. O’Toole – who isn’t even the parliamentary secretary for veterans, but rather international trade – his status as a veteran, plus the ineptitude of both the minister and parliamentary secretary for veterans is why he’s being put forward on the file – was charged with trying to sell this message on The West Block last weekend, to much incredulity. And Tom Clark asked him point blank if that means that the answer is more money for advertising, no matter that they’ve already been spending more on advertising than they’ve saved on closing those veterans service centres around the country. I have a hard time seeing how this is at all a winning strategy because is smacks so much of victim blaming to those veterans who can’t get the help that they need and are entitled to.

Good reads:

• A prominent architect on the jury to select the new National Victims of Communism Memorial says the site chosen by the government is inappropriate, and that it won’t be able to be built for the $5.5 million allotted for it.
• Some of those accidental NDP MPs elected in the last election are planning to run again for real this time, feeling that they’ve proved themselves through hard work.
• Peter Kent talks about trying to negotiate those oil and gas regulations when he was minister of the environment.
• Access to Information documents show how Chinese hackers were able to infiltrate the National Research Council’s computer systems.
• Joe Oliver says that transfers to all provinces are going up this year, including Ontario, after the province took a reduction last year.
• A bid-rigging trial is shining a light on how convoluted the government’s procurement system for consultants and outside aid really is.
• What? The West needs to address the root causes of radicalization? But here I was told that the root cause of terrorism is terrorists!
• Not unsurprisingly, naysayers are taking shots at the newest Supreme Court justice.

Odds and ends:

Paul Wells and John Geddes discuss their picks for best and worst political plays of 2014.

Here is a roundup of responses to the prostitution law coming into force last week.

Denmark is about to claim the North Pole, and the Commons isn’t sitting so there are no MPs to give Members’ Statements about how Santa Claus is a Canadian! OH NOES!