It has not gone unnoticed that the government has not been putting themselves out in front of the release of the Deschamps Report into sexual misconduct in the military, and the opposition is rightly pointing out that there is such a thing as ministerial responsibility, which means that the minister needs to be out in front of this – but he’s not. He’s instead left it up to his parliamentary secretary to deliver some talking points that aren’t actually demonstrating responsibility, and worse yet, they’re almost self-congratulatory as the lines being delivered about how the Chief of Defence Staff ordered the report. Err, so what? The CDS is already pushing back on some of the recommendations by agreeing with eight of the ten “in principle” only, and there is still some level of denial at the top, where they describe that the endemic sexualised culture in the report as simply being the perception of those that Justice Deschamps interviewed. In other words, there needs to be more leadership at the top saying that no, you can’t just shrug this off and do a few things for show – you actually need to push and work at this until there is a genuine culture change. CBC Radio interviewed Major-General Christine Whitecross, who is heading up the response to the report, and she echoed some of that same reluctance, but she did relent on the point that the independent centres for reporting incidents was probably the way to go, but they want to study it some more, both in terms of what our allies have put into place in their own countries, and what resources are available here in Canada, and she is not dismissing it outright, which is at least something.

Good reads:

• Stephen Harper finally named two more people to the Security and Intelligence Review Committee, as interim chair Deb Grey steps down.
• David Reevely looks at how that 2010 Senate audit could help Duffy’s case, while Maclean’s has their week 4 cartoon here.
• Rona Ambrose was warning Alberta about the “risky” NDP, while provincial NDP leader Rachel Notley has distanced herself from Thomas Mulcair.
• The government has started the process for competing for who gets to design the new warships, and they should have someone chosen by 2017. Oh, and the budget is a mess.
• Susan Delacourt looks at partisan advertising, and the Ontario experience in trying to curb it.
• Tabatha Southey tartly rips the government over the Auditor General’s report on preparing offenders for release.

Odds and ends:

Patrick Brazeau’s fraud trial won’t be until March 2016.

The Supreme Court of Canada says that a man who was wrongly imprisoned for 27 years can indeed sue the Crown.

Here’s the Ottawa Citizen Gargoyle roundup of smaller stories from the week.