I think by this point we can pretty much acknowledge that Joe Oliver is not anyone’s best choice to communicate a message – he wasn’t as Natural Resources minister, with his “foreign-funded radicals” warnings about environmentalists, and certainly not as finance minister given his Tuesday night gaffe with CBC’s Amanda Lang. There, he said that any problems with raising the TFSA limit might not happen until 2080, and that he’d leave it for “Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s granddaughter to solve that problem.” Not only did he admit that there was a problem with it, but he decided it’s best to leave it to the next generation – not to mention his prediction that the Harper family will become some kind of dynastic rules of Canada – because we’ve seen so many of those. When opposition parties made hay of it, Harper came out to defend Oliver’s comments, but we have heard this warning before, from the PBO who drafted a report looking at the hole in future budgets that this kind of measure would create, and it’s not inconsiderable, so no, the question being put to Oliver by Lang was more than reasonable, and it would have been irresponsible for her not to ask it. In other post-budget news, here are the opposition positions on many of the pieces therein. There was mention in the budget about “expanding and modernising” the Honours system, but there are almost no details about what that means other than a new website. Pierre Poilievre said the money being given to the Ottawa police is for “fighting jihadis” – except it’s not, but rather for things like demonstrations or visits by foreign dignitaries. Oops. Mike Moffatt looks at the very optimistic budget projections on the price of oil. The budget nearly doubles what it gives to SIRC, but we’ll see if they’ll be expected to do more with it, given that they are already under-resourced. Paul Wells puts absolutely everybody to shame and writes about the budget as political document, and it’s so on point I want to weep.

Good reads:

• The Duffy trial heard from the head of Senate finance, who assured them that yes, there are rules, and among them are the expectation that Senators behave honourably – something that is anathema to Duffy’s lawyer’s case.
• Laura Stone digs through the Duffy diaries and lines up dates he went to personal funerals and charged the travel to the Senate.
• Peter MacKay took to the pages of the National Post to take pot shots at the Supreme Court of Canada for striking down mandatory minimum sentences.
• CSE had internal concerns about their metadata project at Canadian airports.
• The former Clerk of the Privy Council warned Harper about his announcement on the details of the income-splitting proposal outside of the Commons, because it’s not proper to give those details until MPs have heard them.

Odds and ends:

Tony Clement says he’s ready to negotiate with the public sector unions over sick leave, but the budget already books $900 million in savings from changes.

Continued concerns over the proposed Victims of Communism memorial may actually delay its planned construction.

In light of the Supreme Court ruling on municipal meeting prayers, we are now fretting about the practice in the Commons.