There’s the Senate bat-signal again. Conservative Senate leader Claude Carignan says that his caucus won’t abuse their majority in the Senate to thwart Liberal legislation that comes forward, to which I say “Um, yeah. Of course.” Because wouldn’t you know it, Senators have a job to do, and they know it. Of course, I’ve never bought into the conspiracy theory that Conservative senators would be the puppets of Harper, trying to influence things beyond the political grave, or even the theory that they would be extra dickish just because they were Harper appointees. Then again, most people seem to forget that senators of any stripe suddenly get a lot more independent when the PM who appointed them is no longer in office, and they get really, really independent once leadership races kick off. So far we’re at the first of those two, and with the Conservatives as a whole allegedly experimenting with a less command-and-control style of leadership, we may see the yoke they unduly placed over their Senate caucus lifted. Mind you, we’re still waiting for a signal to see what Trudeau will do in terms of both the Speaker of the Senate and the Leader of the Government. Without a Leader, they might as well just cancel Senate Question Period, which would be a loss because it’s quite instructive for how QP in the Commons should be run. Some senators have floated the idea of just having Senate QP be about asking questions to committee chairs (which, incidentally, they already can do), but it’s not a good idea because those committee chairs aren’t going to have a lot to say about issues of the day, they won’t have access to briefing materials, and they aren’t conduits by which the government can be held to account, which is the whole point of QP – not asking details about committee work. But seriously – can we please stop worrying about fantastical hysteria about what the Senate is going to do? 99 percent of it is based on false assumptions and ignorance of the chamber, and it’s so, so tiresome. They have jobs to do. Let them.

Good reads:

• The PBO says that the government was on the way to running deficits even before the last election. So of course the Conservatives blame the Liberals for it.
• Those bigger deficits could have an impact on negotiations with the public service.
• The military says it’s completed a review of the troubled Joint Personnel Support Unit, but won’t release the details, while the minister wants more action on military suicides.
• The Syrian refugee plan is going before cabinet on Thursday.
• The Ethics Commissioner has fined an increasing number of Conservative ministers and their staff for conflicts of interest in the past few years.
• Trudeau says that Bombardier needs to make a strong business case if it wants federal bailout dollars. There are calls to let Bombardier fail for everyone’s sake.
• The government will start consultations on designing the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women in the next couple of weeks.
• A bitter feud is developing between the RCMP and Hill Security over what they see as rewriting history over the October 22^nd attack.
• With the last provincial party with Conservative in the name about to lose power (Newfoundland & Labrador), Colby Cosh wonders about the future of the brand.
• Adam Goldenberg sees a subtle Americanisation in the way that Trudeau has chosen his cabinet.
• My column on Loonie Politics demonstrates why the portrait of the Queen is a bigger issue than just one picture.

Odds and ends:

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan has been released from the Canadian Forces, which is important because civilian control means not controlled by serving members.

It’s something we knew was going on before, but we have new figures to show how Harper was reimbursing economy fares or less for personal Challenger flights.