Actually entitled to her entitlements

Oh, noes! Adrienne Clarkson has used the
privilege she’s entitled to as a former governor general and has hired a publicly
funded assistant to help her coordinate the numerous letters and requests for
speaking engagements she still gets, as well as to help with her duties as colonel-in-chief
of a Canadian Forces regiment! Will this horrible outrage of someone who did
public service for the country remaining engaged ever cease?

The Department of National Defence is shedding a large number of senior officers and bureaucrats who are frustrated
with the government’s continual micro-managing (which is designed to save them embarrassment

rather than be in the Forces’ own interests) and the explosion in under-qualified
public affairs personnel. Sounds like a recipe for waste and trouble.

On a tangentially related note, here is a
rather damning look at our submarine program.

What’s that? NDP MPs are sniping at one
another as they’re proclaiming a “civil” leadership campaign? You don’t say! I
seem to recall that the last party that declared it was going to have a “civil”
leadership campaign was the Liberal Party, and we all know how that turned out.

Here is part three of John Geddes’s takedown of the omnibus crime bill, this time with a special guest appearance by Chief
Justice Beverley McLachlin.

New WikiLeaks cables show that Canada contributed to a ransom paid to free our diplomats kidnapped in West Africa a
couple of years ago – contrary to what Harper told us.

You know things are in sad shape when it
takes a publicized hacking attempt on our country’s financial data to
get IT professionals the tools they need to combat such attempts, rather than allowing them
to be on top of things before they reach the crisis point.

What’s that? Our addiction to polling is
having a deleterious effect on politics? You don’t say! At least some pollsters
are getting the message and trying to talk about how to fix things.

Here’s someone trying to stimulate some
conversation about voting by creating a “hot or not” candidate website. It
can’t be any worse than any other tactics we’ve tried so far.

It turns out that there are three times
as many women on the boards of Crown corporations as on boards in the
private sector – except in the transportation sector. And a Liberal senator’s
attempt to have a bill passed that would help get more women onto boards has been
met with opposition, despite the success that such bills – or the threat of such bills – have had in many European countries.