As part of his visit to Calgary, Justin Trudeau spoke about getting his candidates nominated by the fall, so that they have a full year to start taking on the Conservatives as part of a team effort – something else he says that he wants to emphasise, rather than the Conservatives being all about the Prime Minister. That Trudeau has been making so much effort in Alberta is a contrast to Liberal leaders past, where Alberta has tended to be a flyover province rather than one where they would do much engagement under the advice that there was no way that they could win seats there anyway.

Harper, meanwhile, spent most of his speech to the party faithful at Stampede, talking about Trudeau, and how apparently he has nothing substantial to offer. Curiously, however, Mulcair and the NDP didn’t even get mentioned by name, even though they’re the official opposition and one has to wonder if it’s not more than the usual Conservative soft-touch on them as they would rather have them in opposition while they crush the Liberals, or if it’s a matter that they simply have become irrelevant in the new dynamic with Trudeau now firmly in the picture. As well, it also seems that Harper tried to take some credit for the demise of the PQ in the last Quebec election, which really makes no sense to anyone living in this reality, seeing as Harper is a pretty unpopular figure everywhere in that province, and the federalists won in spite of Harper, not because of him. Michael Den Tandt argues that Harper needs to find a new stump speech, as his talking points are running a bit thin.

Dressed in his Royal Canadian Air Force jacket, Stephen Harper took a helicopter tour of the flood zone in Manitoba along with premier Greg Selinger yesterday. 500 soldiers are currently on the ground helping to fight the flood.

In looking at the suicide crisis that faced the military over the winter, it is thought that only three of the ten cases involved PTSD, and most were not in danger of being let go from the Forces, which complicates some of the narratives that have grown up around that crisis.

Dr. Arthur Porter, languishing in a Panamanian jail while awaiting extradition on charges of fraud, conspiracy, breach of trust, money laundering and participating in secret commission to the tune of $22.5 million in kickbacks, complained to a Panama City newspaper that he’s “angry” with his treatment by Canada. He could come back to Canada to face a fair trial.

In a submission to the CRTC, CBC said that they think that services like Netflix should also be required to pay into the Canadian Media Fund in order to help produce CanCon. Netflix said that it would end up benefitting other media companies who use the fund to produce content for their channels and then gain the exclusive streaming rights – but I’m not sure why they wouldn’t instead want to access the fund to create their own Netflix Canada originals, especially given the market share that they have here.

Pundit’s Guide crunches the poll-by-poll numbers of the Fort McMurray–Athabasca by-election, and finds that under the new boundaries, the Liberals likely would have won the seat.

https://twitter.com/punditsguide/status/485927028655263745

There appears to be waning interest in the Prime Minister’s Volunteer Awards, if the lack of applications is any indication. It’s also a reminder of why our awards and honours system in this country go through the Crown – because it’s an apolitical and neutral system whereby the Queen is the font of honours, not the government of the day. That Harper tried to go around that with a bit of self-aggrandizement is not surprising, and he’s reaping the rewards of that.

Susan Delacourt writes that if voters are “consumers,” as we’re continually being told, then the low voter turnout of the recent by-elections would seem to indicate that the business model is failing (though I still can’t wrap my head around the end game of the notion that the by-election date was set in order to deliberately drive down voter turnout, as opposed to he waited too long to call it and was left with few decent options, especially with the Ontario election going on).

Up today: The start of four days of marathon hearings into the prostitution bill, and Peter MacKay is going to be the first witness, where I’m sure he’ll tell us that everything is fine and constitutional, nothing to see here, and so on.