Government Whip Gordon O’Connor responds to Liberal Whip Roger Cuzner’s letter with a letter riddled with inaccuracies and innuendo. Attached was a series of proposed motions (which NDP House Leader Libby Davies told me yesterday that she was still considering).

The Conservatives also sent the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt a 13-page letter detailing all the things they’ve been up to during prorogation. The Liberals promptly crunched the numbers and found that few of them did more than six days’ work. Imagine that. Add to that, the Department of Finance refuses to say just how many emails they received from the public as “consultations,” because they consider it “advice to the minister.” Seriously?

Minister of State for Status of Women Helena Guergis, a woman who never veers from her talking points, had a profanity-laced meltdown in the Charlottetown airport last week. In a bizarre turn of events, she apologized publicly yesterday morning without anyone knowing what for – until an anonymous letter faxed to Liberal MP Wayne Easter’s office started to make the rounds and told the whole story. But seriously – she should know better than to show up at an airport 10 minutes before the flight is scheduled to take off.

Michael Ignatieff let his displeasure with the government’s choice for the new head of Rights and Democracy be known, including highlighting all those things on his CV that the government neglected to mention.

The Liberals have also released the list of speakers at their upcoming Canada 150 conference. All of them can now expect to turn up on Conservative press releases being denounced as Liberal stooges advocating the destruction of Canada, or some other such hyperbolic nonsense.

The RCMP have revealed details on how Greenpeace got onto the roof of the West Block to hang those banners before being arrested. They say the weakness in security has been corrected, so we can only hope so, lest Greenpeace ruin it for everyone else.

The NDP’s budget suggestion of the day is… cancelling corporate tax cuts. Again.

NDP House Leader Libby Davies has been keeping an eye on the police presence in Vancouver during the Olympics, and on any social cleansing kinds of activities the police may be engaging in. This on top of getting ready for Parliament's return in less than a week's time. I spoke to her this morning from her riding in Vancouver.

Q: How is your Olympic vigilance going?
A: Well, pretty good. There’s so much going on – it’s very intense. The “tent village” is set up in the Downtown East Side on a vacant lot, which was meant to be a parking lot for VANOC, and it’s been taken over by about 80 tents, and it’s part of what’s called the Red Tent Campaign. I’ve just been talking with folks down there, and the key issue is when they fold up their tents, most people have nowhere to go. Most people are actually homeless, so we’ve been trying to get BC Housing, which is the provincial housing agency, to help find places for people to go. It’s very well organised, very well managed, and it’s amazing that there are some people there who were in shelters who actually prefer to be there a tent than in a shelter because there’s a much stronger sense of community, and people are sitting around a campfire at night singing songs, and of course the weather’s been good, but of course it started raining. There’s just an awful lot of activity going on in Vancouver, both with the Olympics and stuff that’s associated with it.

Q: Have you heard of any security-related incidents?
A: No. Most people I’ve talked to have felt that the police have acted with restraint. At the rallies and protests that I’ve been at, the police have been barely visible. Downtown, there is a police presence, but it’s not that visible, and when I was at the tent village, there were police walking around. They are on the sidewalks, walking down the back lane, and also interestingly, they’re also accompanied by Canada Border Service Agency – CBSA. Some people ask why would they be here, patrolling lanes in the Downtown East Side, and what I’ve heard is that they’re on the lookout for people who they think are not meant to be there, meant to be deported or whatever. So that’s curious that they’re monitoring the tent city for people who they feel may be there illegally. They haven’t gone into the tent city so far as I know, but they have been certainly going around it. People have told me that there are probably security forces on rooftops on the surrounding buildings, and taking photos and if they’ve got cameras, I don’t know, but in terms of direct police harassing people, again I haven’t heard anything specifically. I had a couple of comments about the police harassing people, but it was very generalised. I haven’t heard any specific situation. There was that one so-called riot outside the Bay, but I think a lot of people felt that the police actually acted in a very restrained way in response to that.

Q: That’s good, I guess, considering how much concern there was in the lead-up.
A: Yeah, but for sure there’s a massive police presence overall. You see officers everywhere. In fact, one city councillor told me that they were more concerned that there might be some sort of riot downtown after a hockey game or something, because there has been drinking. I think it might change a little bit with the weather now, but on Saturday, you could just feel the intensity of so many people on a beautiful warm afternoon, and I wasn’t even downtown late at night. I think it changes at night, but they closed down the liquor stores early one night, Saturday.

Q: Otherwise, the House comes back next week, so what are you doing in preparation for that?
A: I’ll be in Ottawa on Monday, and we have caucus meetings, and already the Conservatives are making requests. It’s quite breathtaking their huge capacity to just take more, take more, take more. They prorogued the House, they changed the calendar, they demand that the calendar be changed again, then they say that they want all these motions – we want to reinstate things when we want them, and I just find that their demands and their greediness is quite breathtaking. We will obviously be looking over these various so-called “requests” that they’ve put forward, but I think the feeling in our caucus is fairly strong that these people made a decision for prorogation, and they have to deal with the consequences. We’re obviously looking at what’s coming in, and I think the first few days back will be very intense – obviously the budget, and the various motions. Usually there’s a sub-amendment, an amendment, and the main vote on the budget after four days of debate, so I think it’ll be pretty intense. But our folks are all fired up. We had a health forum taking place, and I talked to a number of our caucus members and I think people feel really very fired up to go back and take them on. We’re ready. We were ready a long time ago. We were ready five-and-a-half weeks ago.

Q: So you’re even more ready now.
A: We’re even more ready now.

Q: Do you have any more demands in terms of what they’re demanding?
A: I just got the motions yesterday that they want, and we’re looking them over right now, and we’ll decide how to respond to that.

Q: With Jack Layton’s treatments, does this mean that you’ll be front-and-centre a little more during Question Period for the next few weeks?
A: Not necessarily. I think Jack is very much involved in doing things. He’s still being as active as he’s ever been, and I think we’ll see him be very active in the House when we return. Thomas Mulcair and I are there obviously to give him all the support he needs, and if there are extra things to be done we’re certainly ready to do that, but I think Jack’s pretty fired up as well. He seems to be in very good spirits, good energy and I think he’s ready to get back into the House. We’ll be there to support him all the way.

The Clerk of the Privy Council Office is so concerned that non-partisan departments are being politicized into sending out partisan news releases on behalf of their ministers that he’s doing something about it. He’s… changing the headlines of those releases to be ever so slightly less partisan. Because he believes in taking the Treasury Board guidelines seriously. Wow – I’m glad he’s looking out for the independence of the civil service and standing up to this government’s attempts to further politicize it.

In the event that you weren’t convinced the world has gone Twitter-mad, the Finance Department is in on it. Does this mean the fad is now over? Like when grown-ups start using the street slang of youth? And hey, it’s not like they can’t fit this year’s budget details into 140 characters – “No new taxes, no new spending. Go team Harper,” and a hashtag or two. But seriously? Does this also mean that we’ll get tweets from Flaherty – or maybe his deputy minister – on what he had for lunch, and what he thought of the hockey score?

(Apparently there is a second, similar Twitter account, which may or may not be an imposter. Which is the real one? Drama! And you thought politics was boring).

Mexico’s wrath for the Canadian policy requiring Mexicans to get visas before entering the country has just been felt by NDP MP Bruce Hyer, whose green Parliamentary passport was flagged when he tried to go to the country for a vacation and meetings on climate change. Out of pocket thousands of dollars, Hyer went to the Grand Canyon instead, but now says he has one more reason to be grumpy with Harper.

The PMO wants you to know that Maxime Bernier is just freelancing when he’s coming to the defence of climate change skeptics. It’s not official government policy. Really. Government policy is to mouth that they believe in climate change, but to stall and delay and do nothing about it, so really, there should be no cause for confusion.

What’s this? Federal funds are going toward an evangelical youth centre in Winnipeg targeting aboriginal youth? Is there any doubt as to why members of the aboriginal community are raising the alarm that this is just like the legacy of the residential schools, going after their children’s souls? And did I fail to mention that federal tax dollars are going toward this evangelical organization? Separation of Church and State? Anyone? Can somebody please sound an alarm bell?

And the NDP budget suggestion of the day yesterday was about – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – cancelling the planned corporate tax cuts. Incidentally, the Toronto Star crunched some of those numbers, and keeping the cuts wouldn’t do much to help the state of the deficit.

Poor Justice Minister Rob Nicholson. It must be so terrible when the media doesn’t want to take the lines you feed them and they actually challenge you on the spin you’re pushing. Well, journalists other than Evan Soloman, who gave you questions so soft they might as well have been fluffy kitties and didn’t challenge you on any single piece of utter nonsense that you spouted (such as being assured by Corrections Canada that they have the capacity to handle all the new prisoners that these minimum sentencing bills would engender, when you and I both know that’s patently false). But judging from his crankiness at yesterday’s press conference, I have no doubt that you feel just so put out by such uncooperative free media who are doing their jobs. I almost feel as bad for you as when certain Senators lay the smackdown on you for distorting what goes on in the Upper Chamber.

Nicholson also isn’t concerned about the diplomatic note the government sent to the United States on the disposition of Omar Khadr. Not that this is a surprise, given that any deviation would mean having to learn all new talking points, including on where to appropriately feign outrage in a wooden manner.

The government has a solution to the problems facing the embattled Rights and Democracy agency – appoint a former Separatist-turned-Canadian Alliance candidate to head it. Because they have such a stellar track record when it comes to appointing their own partisan hacks and cronies to these kinds of positions.

(Ignatieff, by the way – not a fan of the choice.)

The NDP budget suggestion of the day yesterday was on… seniors. Again? Okay. This time it was about raising the GIS.

And finally, over in Alberta, the premier says he’s planning on holding a new round of Senate “consultative elections” as the current list is due to expire before too long. Of course, these are nothing but one big farce, from the lack of actual constitutional legitimacy, to the fact that they’re run in a largely disorganized manner with virtually no advertising, so that for most voters (and even run alongside provincial or municipal elections, the turnout was really, really poor), people are simply told to pick four or so from a list of names that mean nothing to anyone. No, seriously – that’s how they do it, and I looked at the Alberta Elections filings from the last time around. More than half of the “candidates” (and I use the term loosely) had declared zero dollars on advertising.  It’s a mockery of actual democracy, of the legitimacy  they want to give the Senate, and it’s not something that Harper or any political leader should seriously be endorsing.

Up today – the NDP are apparently taking a page from the Liberals’ playbook and are hosting a panel discussion on the future of health care today on the Hill.

Remember that report on the gun registry that the Minister of Public Safety sat on while the vote on abolishing said registry was happening in the House of Commons? The Toronto Star has done some digging and found that not only did the Minister sit on it for weeks, but he wasn’t impressed by the fact that police were using it more, and that there was greater satisfaction by users – not something one wants to hear when they want it gone. And once again, they’re playing politics with the fruits of the public service’s labours, trying to politicize it, and trying to hide any “inconvenient truths” that are contrary to ideology.

Remember a couple of weeks ago there was a story about how political staffers interfered with Access to Information requests? Well, as it turns out, that was just the tip of the iceberg, and the Hill Times has a whole story on the practice, complete with a leaky anonymous Conservative staffer. While it’s no surprise, it’s further evidence of the lengths this government will go to control the message and the agenda, and of once again politicizing the civil service. And while it’s good that these stories are getting out, it needs to be enough to get voters to care about the issue, and not be just another one-off that they’ll shrug off.

Liberal Senator Colin Kenny, ever the firebrand, went ahead and released a position paper that he and the other five Liberals on the Senate security and defence committee prepared on the topic of revitalizing the RCMP. The Conservatives on that committee immediately turned around and blasted him for playing politics. But, um, of course that’s why he did it. He’s almost certainly about to lose the chairmanship of that committee, and he wants to get the information into the public domain before what he sees as the Conservatives’ attempts at delay take hold. It’s too bad that partisanship has taken root in that committee, but Kenny has never been one to be afraid of speaking truth to power (no matter which party is in government), so it’s good to see that he’s not backing down.

On the topic of rogue senators, Senator Elaine McCoy – who I will remind you is made of awesome – wrote an op-ed for the Toronto Star over the weekend in which she lays out the case for an appointed Senate. She proposes the appointments commission-model of Senate appointment, which is probably one of the best (and most realistically achievable) options on the table, and one that deserves more consideration.

Previews for the upcoming budget say no new taxes, and no new spending programs outside of what’s been allocated for the Economic Action Plan™. And also no realistic plan for getting us out of deficit. When opposition MPs learned that the government provided details of it to the media, well, they flipped. Scott Brison said that this incident, along with prorogation, amounted to a “jihad” on Parliament by Conservatives. Tell us how you really feel!

Incidentally, the NDP appear to be starting a weeklong series of budget suggestion press releases, and Monday’s was all about Seniors and the GIS.