Government programmes that allow their Crown Corporations to lend money are growing without any parliamentary oversight, and certainly no statutory review once these programmes have been in place, whether it’s student loans or business development loans. Now, the Parliamentary Budget Officer is sounding the alarm, because it’s one more way in which parliamentarians have lost control over the public purse and have little ability to hold the government to account for any of these loans that they are giving out. Add to the fact that they have already lost the ability to hold the government o account for any borrowing that the government does – they took that bit of oversight away a couple of years ago as part of an omnibus budget bill, despite it being a fundamental part of our Westminster democratic traditions, and now any borrowing simply requires a nod from cabinet – hardly an effective check on government’s financial decisions. Further add to that the fact that the government has been putting out budgets with no numbers in it, and Estimates not attached to any budget so that there is no comparison or examination of what’s in it in a fiscal perspective, and it all adds up to parliamentarians not doing their jobs, and being able to control the purse strings of the government of the day, making Parliament a shadow version of itself. This should alarm everybody in this country because this is the parliament that you’ve elected not doing their jobs.

Good reads:

• The chair of the Senate’s security and defence committee says we need to prosecute terror suspects more frequently as we deal with radicalisation.
• In case you were wondering, it’s not illegal to “Spock” an older $5 bill in Canada.
• A programme that has proven effective in preventing high-risk sex offenders from reoffending is having its funding cut, because of course it is.
• An injunction has been made to the devolution of powers to the Northwest Territories because of First Nations land claims.
• Jason Kenney tweeting about Nathan Cirillo’s death before the chain of command even had confirmation made a lot of people at DND very angry.
• Here’s a conversation with a researcher on the links between Muslim converts and extremism.
• The deepwater Arctic port the government has been promising since they first got elected has been delayed yet again to 2018.
• Philippe Lagassé explains the significance of the Supreme Court of Canada passing on the Oath to the Queen challenge last week.

Odds and ends:

A retired judge in BC is running for the NDP, which sparks questions about the wisdom of such a move and the damage it can do to the justice system.

Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant not only offered gross mischaracterisations of Ontario’s new sex ed curriculum, she also apparently has no idea how federalism works in this country.

Conservative MP James Lunney insists that evolution is not a fact. Well then.