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Orders of the Day - Tuesday, November 3, 2009

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Auditor General Sheila Fraser. (Tom Hanson/Canadian Press)

Okay, forget the Royals -- the Auditor General is coming! The Auditor General is coming! With   reports on foreign workers, and military procurement, and electronic health records, and CIDA!   Really, there's nothing like an imminent Auditor General Day to whip opposition parties and journalists into a frenzy of anticipation matched in intensity only by the sick dread with which the government awaits her revelations. That is, if she has anything really juicy to reveal, which is -- sadly, or fortunately, depending on your perspective -- not often the case. Darn you, efficient machinery of government. Anyway, her fall quarterly collection comes out this afternoon, which means we can likely expect at least a few questions on the contents during Question Period. 

Also in the House: As predicted by OotD -- okay, not that it required much in the way of preternatural political prescience to do so -- the bill to extend EI benefits for long-time workers made it through report stage by the end of the day, and is now ready for its third-reading closeup. It's possible that the two opposition parties that don't support it -- that would be the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois -- will want to spend a little time putting their respective reasons for voting nay on the record. Still, it should be off to the Senate by the end of the week, thus freeing up the Commons to get back to the government's law-and-order legislative theme pack -- that is, after tomorrow's Liberal opposition day. 

Over on the committee front, Dean del Mastro's sponsorship scandal commemorative motion appears to have hit a last-minute snag, and no longer shows up on the agenda for today's Ethics meeting. If I had to guess -- and I don't, but I will anyway because that's just how we do it in the OotD -- I'd say it's probably just a temporary delay, as I have a sneaking suspicion that leaking the text to the Sun chain and/or Stephen Taylor does not, in fact, constitute proper notice under our charmingly anachronistic, yet unyielding standing orders. Lesson learned. Meanwhile, there are two other motions on the to-do list today; one from del Mastro's far more procedurally adroit colleague Pierre Poilievre, and another from the NDP's Pat Martin. Before all that gets underway, however, the committee will hear from interim Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault. 

As the Ethics committee slowly becomes embroiled in yet another passive aggressive war of attrition, open hostilities may break out over at Foreign Affairs, which has brought together various consular and departmental officials tto discuss the treatment of Canadians abroad; this was, of course, a source of sporadic but regularly occurring outrage for the Liberals over the summer, and even made it that now at least a little bit tragically ironic in retrospect speech that the leader gave in Sudbury, although we haven't heard much about it lately, have we? Then again, you can say that about so many of the things up with which Ignatieff once assured us he had no intention of putting. 

Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page and his crack team of assistant budget officers will share their somewhat gloomy fiscal projections with the Finance committee, which is working overtime today; after Team PBO manages to thoroughly depress everyone with his Eeyoreian assessment of the state of the nation's books, the committee turns its attention to the budget implementation bill, which will keep them busy for the rest of the morning and well into the early afternoon, with the meeting not scheduled to break until just before Question Period. Then again, this is the same committee that regularly holds day-long budget consultations with standing-room only witness panels, so they're probably used to it.  

Finally, this afternoon will see one of the NDP's dozen-or-so private members' bills on employment insurance reform take centre stage at Human Resources -- odds that the Liberals will oppose it out of sheer pettiness: 1:1 -- and the Clerk of the Privy Council, Wayne Wouters enduring what he doubtless hopes will be a rare moment in the spotlight over at Government Operations and Estimates. 

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