The Conservative national council, plus about twenty other individuals including MP Diane Finley, are nearly set to lay out their leadership campaign rules, including the date of the vote – likely sometime in 2017. I’m sure we’ll start seeing the campaigns start to rev up soon after that – Kellie Leitch and Jason Kenney out the door first, and over time, I’m sure a not-Jason-Kenney candidate will emerge for others to start coalescing around. People keep saying Lisa Raitt, but I haven’t seen any sign of her French improving, and that is going to be an important consideration with the party having improved its fortunes in Quebec in the last election. And then there’s Peter MacKay, who leads in the polling on the subject, but I’m not sure that he’s had enough time and distance from politics just yet, not to mention the fact that he really isn’t the Red Tory that most people seem to think he is (just because he very briefly led the Progressive Conservatives after winning the leadership on a promise that he immediately turned around and broke). I’m not unconvinced that there needs to be someone who was much more of an outsider, largely untainted by the Harper years, who will be the instrument of the party broadening its base more as part of the leadership process, and again, I really doubt that MacKay is that person. He is intimately tied with Harper for his joining with him in the creation of the party, and I fail to see how that would be any kind of asset in a leadership race where the party would need to show that it is moving on from those years, rather than simply moving to relive them.

Good reads:

• While Canada prepares to pull our CF-18s out of Iraq within weeks, NATO is quietly asking us about training and defence capacity building in Iraq.
• Bill Moreau admitted that their tax cut won’t be revenue neutral, but will cost an extra $1.2 billion.
• PCO outspent every other department on polling last year, spending half a million dollars (double its budget) leading up to the election.
• The Liberal government plans to ask for an extra $280 million to help Syrian refugees as part of the Supplemental Estimates.
• Some possible leaks from inside the Liberal caucus room, where Trudeau instructs cabinet to attend caucus, and tells MPs treat his inner circle as speaking for him.
• The Liberals also plan to ask some 33 Conservative patronage appointments to voluntarily step aside.
• In the Duffy trial, the Crown (finally) rests its case after hearing from Senator Furey about those very same Senate rules, which did exist (O’Malley recap here).
• The government quietly paid out $2.8 million to settle dozens of human rights lawsuits last year, including $1.7 to an Algerian deported the day after 9/11.
• The government has announced their intention to table a bill on RCMP unionization.
• Stephen Gordon puts forward the interesting case of how higher taxes on the wealthy may actually increase inequality.

Odds and ends:

Kady O’Malley offers her gift suggestions for parliamentary geeks on your list.

BuzzFeed combed through the Public Accounts for weird and interesting lost or damage costs incurred by the government.