The next election marker has been set, which is the budget date – April 21^st, shortly after MPs return from the Easter break. Joe Oliver says it’ll be balanced, but the real trick will be finding out how he did it, either by raiding the contingency reserve, or cutting a programme somewhere, or delaying some kind of capital expenditure, quite possibly from a military procurement project that is bogged down in a lengthy and probably broken procurement process. Their marquee spending plan, their family tax package including income splitting, has already been introduced as a standalone piece of legislation, inexplicably, unless you look at it through the lens that they want to see the spectacle of the opposition parties voting against it because of the income splitting portion of the bill. They’ve already been mindlessly parroting the talking points about these tax measures, which will supposedly not only help parents with childcare (not really) but also provide just the kind of economic stimulus the country needs (err, childcare?) and do whatever else the question asked of the government was. It’s not that it matters, because they want to set up the narrative that the opposition parties will rip the money out of the wallets of parents if they get to power, which is why the government deliberate set up that this programme would give those parents a lump sum cheque in the middle of summer – so that it’s in their wallets closer to the election so that their warnings resonate, never mind that the warnings aren’t true either – both opposition parties have stated that they won’t touch the enhanced benefits, just income splitting, which most households won’t see any real difference from anyway . It’s not that they haven’t abandoned their other talking points either – Greg Rickford was just in Calgary giving fabulist tales of the kind of carbon scheme that Justin Trudeau would introduce, never mind that it has no grounding in reality. It’s not just that they repeat these fictions endlessly, but that they are now non sequitur answers to any question put to them. We’ve apparently reached the stage in our political evolution where Conservative MPs have become these dolls with pull-strings that will play you one of a small number of randomly selected phrases. And if this is what we’re going to be subjected to for the next six months, I may yet go insane before then.

Good reads:

• The Conservative Senate Leader is trying to act calm in the face of the reports of those alleged 40 letters to senators, saying it’s expected over the course of an audit.
• Despite Rona Ambrose insisting there’s no cut to meat inspectors in northern Alberta, iPolitics got the documents to prove it.
• To nobody’s surprise, Canada opted not to join a continental climate change plan with the US and Mexico.
• Perhaps trying to deflect from their own problems, the NDP accused Liberal House Leader Dominic LeBlanc of using parliamentary resources to assist in the New Brunswick election, which he denies and says he has the paperwork to back it up.
• Aaron Wherry recounts Justin Trudeau’s failed attempt at engaging MPs in a dialogue about his transparency bill, and what it means about his plans for Parliament.

Odds and ends:

Former Conservative cabinet minister Carol Skelton has been named to the board of the Royal Canadian Mint. She had previously been appointed to SIRC post-Arthur Porter.

The OPP report into the Parliament Hill shooting is set to show that killing the shooter was justified.

Journalists talk to other journalists about the forthcoming circus of the Duffy trial.

Lieutenant General Jon Vance is the next Chief of the Defence Staff. Sources say Vance has been tapped to take over as Canada's top general.

— Mercedes Stephenson (@MercedesGlobal) April 3, 2015