A likely rehash of the budget

Just in case you were wondering, all indications are that the budget will be pretty much the same as the one from March. Officials feel that it may be so similar that they’re not even sure they’ll bother with a media lock-up.

Thomas Mulcair says he doesn’t doubt the existence of photos of bin Laden’s corpse – he was confused by the context of the conversation and thought they were talking about photos of him possibly reaching for a gun. Ah. Except that’s not actually what he said about “pictures of the cadaver.”

Uh oh! Many of the new NDP MPs from Quebec are talking a lot about sovereignty.

Here’s an interview with one of those Quebec mystery candidates who was nowhere to be found during the election. The party kept claiming that she was busy campaigning and didn’t have a cellphone. And wouldn’t you know it, she gave some bland party-scripted answers in response to serious questions about how she planned to represent Quebec in the post-Bloc era.

Here’s an insightful article on the myths the Liberals need to abandon if they hope to rebuild.

As Michael Ignatieff heads off to a teaching position at the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto, here is another thoughtful piece on Ignatieff before he got into politics and what politics did to his intellectualism.

In an interview with Postmedia News, Peter Milliken laments the erosion of democracy. He says that little can be done about decorum in the House unless parties police their own behaviour. Milliken was hesitant to say that the Speaker should have more power as he felt that the parties wouldn’t be pleased about restricting freedom of speech in the House. (And yes, I did watch the Conservatives cry bloody murder when Milliken cracked down on some of their worst abuses.)

And post-election focus-group research shows that the gains made by both the Conservatives and the NDP may simply be ephemeral and a result of minority fatigue. It has been historically proven that the Canadian electorate is less bound to brand loyalty than voters in other countries, which could bring another dramatic shift by the time 2015 rolls around.