Pre-election tours abound

By now you’ve heard about the tours that Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe are going on, while Harper is venturing into enemy territory of his own – Toronto. Ooh, scary! But at his second stop in a suburban shopping mall in Ottawa, Michael Ignatieff said that the recent shooting incident in Arizona demonstrated the need for tough gun-control laws. This while a Conservative MP says that farmers need more access to unrestricted firearms because of the Coyote Menace. Seriously.

Speaking of Conservatives saying the darnedest things, Maxime Bernier is at it again, this time publicly opposing his party’s position on a single national securities regulator, saying it’s up to the provinces to decide these things, not the government. But hey, he’ll totally respect a Supreme Court decision on the issue, because I’m sure they’re probably better constitutional experts than his fanciful interpretation of the original 1867 British North America Act.

Michaëlle Jean was in Haiti to mark the first anniversary of the earthquake there.

Liberal justice critic Marlene Jennings met with the Ontario justice minister to discuss what his province’s issues are. Bob Rae took to the National Post to take them to task for parroting Harper’s lines on his visit to the UAE.

Apparently the government has mothballed Environment Canada planes loaded with special cutting-edge technology to track pollution, oil spills and other ecological disasters, preferring the piecemeal approach that the auditor general has taken them to task for. Some are calling it the see-no-evil approach to things like oil spills, and it sounds like an apt description.

QMI looks at refugee-acceptance rates, particularly around Tamils.

The head of CSIS bristled at one of the recommendations coming out of the Air India inquiry, told Vic Toews, the public safety minister, as much, and the effect was to gut much of the inquiry’s report. Richard Fadden said that beefing up the National Security Advisor would undermine ministerial responsibility – and perhaps he’s got a point. But it’s not like this government really pays attention to ministerial accountability or responsibility.

And a survivor of abuses in a polygamous community says she thinks it should be decriminalized, because that might give some of the people involved some rights that can then be protected, unlike their current status, where polygamy laws aren’t being enforced anyway.