It was only the flow of routine proceedings that kept the back-to-work legislation for CP Rail from being tabled yesterday, as the Teamsters ended their strike and announced that they would enter into arbitration with CP. In fact, the government has already put the procedural wheels in motion to limit debate on said legislation to a mere three-and-a-half hours for all stages, but the strike ended a mere half-hour before the actual bill was due to be tabled. So there’s that. I was curious to see how the government was going to get around the whole Supreme Court ruling on the right to strike, but alas, it didn’t see the light of day. This all being said, there were questions being put to the NDP about whether the rail should be considered an essential service because of the way that they have monopolies – particularly in the prairie provinces – but they refused to answer, instead giving yet another paean to workers’ rights. It would be nice if the debate could acknowledge that this is complicated rather than just yelling “fragile economy!” and “workers rights!” at one another the whole time.

Good reads:

• Some of the top CBC brass are headed to a Senate committee to answer questions about recent controversies there.
• In advance of the PBO’s report on estimated costs of the Iraq mission coming out this morning, Jason Kenney released a figure of $122 million last night.
• It looks like some Conservative MPs may have problems of their own with regard to improper mailings – but not to the extent of the NDP’s.
• The backlog in paying former reservists their severance pay is up to two years long. But hey, the government invested in the military and didn’t make cuts, remember?

Odds and ends:

Rob Nicholson proved that he can speak French – by reading a prepared statement with awful butchered pronunciation during QP. Bilingualism!

Joe Oliver’s people forgot to pay for his hotel room in Wakefield after a meeting with economists in August, and weren’t alerted to it for two months, at which point it created a huge headache for bureaucrats.

Continuing his dog whistle politics while in Quebec, Stephen Harper said that Quebeckers didn’t hate Conservatives, but that employees of Radio-Canada hated conservative values. Uh huh.

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