Yesterday it was revealed that Conservative MP Wai Young spoke at a church congregation to tell them that Harper was doing things in the same vein as Jesus, and used Bill C-51 as an example. Because Jesus was really concerned about giving inordinate powers to intelligence agencies without any kind of oversight, and about preventing terrorist attacks – oh, wait. No he wasn’t. While Young’s terrible theology sparked the usual ridicule over the Twitter Machine, it was her other statement that was perhaps most alarming, which was her claim that CSIS knew there was a bomb on the Air India flight 30 years ago, but were forbidden from sharing that information with the RCMP, and 400 people died as a result. Except no, none of that is true, they didn’t know and they could share information. Oops. Young later claimed that she “misspoke,” but that seems to be code amongst Conservative MPs for making stuff up. You know, like when that other Conservative backbencher apologised to the House for “misspeaking” when he claimed that he has directly witnessed people taking voter identification cards out of the recycling bin with the intention of casting fraudulent ballots. Turns out that one wasn’t true either. But hey, political fabulism is apparently okay so long as you apologise for “misspeaking” when you get caught. Truth and debating on the strength of your ideas doesn’t matter – no, you can just invent things out of whole cloth, repeat complete fabrications against your opponents (income splitting for seniors, anyone?) and say it often enough in the hopes that people will start believing it’s true (Hello, 2011 election). Why wouldn’t a backbencher like Young think it’s okay if this is the behaviour that she’s watching get rewarded by everyone else around her? It’s a sad indictment of the state of our political discourse.

Good reads:

• Ruh-roh! It looks like the trade deal with Europe continues to hit snags and won’t be fully signed before the election.
• Rosemary Barton has a pretty tough interview with the Prime Minister of Ukraine.
• While the government keeps talking about how great the manufacturing sector is doing, their internal reports show that it’s really not so hot after all.
• The court case around the niqab ban may be back on to challenge the constitutional validity, which the lower court decision didn’t touch.
• One third of public service executives have “mentally checked out,” because shuffling them between departments and taking away meaningful work helps.
• Kady O’Malley looks at the possibility of the Prime Minister ignoring the fixed-election-date in order to call a later election.
• Stephen Gordon writes about micro-targeting government spending and vote-getting, and notes that it really was ever thus; he also previews today’s Bank of Canada announcement.
• My column this week debunks some of the notions that the Senate is supposed to be non-partisan, and diagnoses some of its current problems.

Odds and ends:

Conservative Minister Lynne Yelich lost her nomination battle to a local sports caster in her redrawn riding.

Pundit Wars: Colby Cosh and Chris Selley sound off on Mother Canada, and it’s glorious.

Facebook crunched some numbers to find the pop culture preferences for supporters of each party.

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