Guess what, boys, girls and trannies? Harper is prepping a “minor” cabinet shuffle in preparation for a possible spring election. Not that Harper wants one. No sir, he’s not going to do anything to provoke one with the election.
Scott Brison, meanwhile, is dismissing those notions that the Conservatives are playing nice with the NDP, saying the only thing they have in common is avoiding an election at any cost. Or at least getting another 900+ page omnibus budget bill passed without proper scrutiny. But hey, Harper gave Layton enough of a fig leaf in the past to avoid a confidence vote on employment insurance.
Now that the government has been called out on it and caught with their proverbial pants down, it looks like those new cigarette warning labels will finally get put into place.
The Commons public safety committee’s report on mental health and addictions in prisons is finally tabled, and wouldn’t you know, it’s full of dissenting opinions on all sorts of things, from the use of harm reduction in prisons, or the way mental health issues are addressed, to the closure of the prison farms, which opposition parties want restored.
Remember Suaad Hagi Mohamud, the Somali-Canadian trapped in Kenya because she was deemed an imposter and needed a DNA test to get back to Canada? She’s just been awarded $13,5000 for her legal fees, and she still has a $2.5 million lawsuit before the courts.
Aaron Wherry looks at the year in Tony Clement, and how he does and doesn’t seem to embody a government that is apparently made of Teflon, as none of the unthinkable things they do seems to stick. (Note: Teflon could also be code for an unengaged electorate too apathetic to care about the direction the country is headed in, or who have no attention span for any of it.)
And Susan Delacourt talks to Michael Ignatieff about his transition from being a journalist to a politician, and how that change in relationship is a very interesting one for him.
Why you can trust Xtra
