It’s that time of year, when the prime minister is starting his rounds of year-end interviews, and thus far, with CTV and The Canadian Press having been done so far. Some of the newsworthy moments have been that he is saying that he is looking for a way to get out of the weapons deal with Saudi Arabia. He also says he’s not planning on an early election (to which I would say of course, because he’s going to have too hard of a time getting everything he needs to get done before the fall, so why would he want to go early?) There was also some very careful language around Energy East, both in that there is not a current proposal on the table so any talk of it is hypothetical, but also that under the current approach, there is no support for the project in Quebec, which could mean that under a different environmental assessment regime (like the one they’re planning in Bill C-69) they may have better luck. Maybe. But I did find the qualifier very interesting. He also pushed back against some of the simplistic notions around the deficit in some of his clearest responses to date (though he still used much of the same pabulum language), so that’s maybe a sign he’s improving on that file. Maybe. He also warned about using populist anger over issues like immigration, which immediately made the Conservatives get huffy and say that he was launching personal attacks, and so on.

Out of all of this, I was most interested in what he had to say about the Senate, and how he plans to make changes to the Parliament of Canada Act, though the headline says this is about trying to make it harder for a future PM to make changes to reverse his reforms – though the Act wouldn’t do that at all, nor does he actually say that in the interview quotes, so I’m not sure where they got that notion from. I am on the record as saying that I think they should hold off on these changes for now, because the Senate has made sessional orders to do everything that they need them to do around the additional caucus funds and so on, and because it’s simply too early to make these kinds of permanent changes to the legislative authority given that the “reforms” have been ham-fisted and ill-considered, and we could very well be creating even more problems for ourselves down the road. But they want to ram this through before the election, and there is going to be a fight on their hands to do it, so we’ll see how that plays out in the New Year.

Good reads:

• Our ambassador in China has now met with the second detainee, Michael Spavor.
• The Air Passengers’ Bill of Rights is due to be unveiled today.
• Canada negotiated an additional side letter to the TPP with Japan on auto sales, but it’s unclear how much it will benefit Canada.
• Climate negotiators in Poland have agreed to transparent rules for achieving the Paris targets. Activists say it’s not enough, naturally.
• Canada is seeing some copycat yellow vest protestors who don’t understand what the French protests were about, and have attracted white nationalists.
• Here’s a bit of Centre Block nostalgia, with a look at the seldom-seen Cabinet Room.
• Speaker Geoff Regan also gives a tour of his “apartment” in Centre Block.
• NDP MP Sheila Malcolmson has been acclaimed in the BC by-election she will run in, and say she’ll resign her seat when that by-election is called.
• It looks like former PQ Cabinet minister Yves-François Blanchet is due to be acclaimed as the new leader of the Bloc. Because they haven’t learned.
• Here’s a look at some of the companies like Suncor, which will be most negatively impacted by the mandated production cut in Alberta.
• Quebeckers say they don’t want Energy East, so now we’re getting stories about how they use more gasoline, ignoring that Energy East wasn’t for domestic use.

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