Bureaucrat: "The next conversation though is quite critical which is one that we enter into and it's the "I promise" conversation. That's where we say "we've received your application, we've looked at it and I promise that we will reimburse this share of costs". That's where Vote 35 was critical for us. Under the Financial Administration Act I cannot promise to pay for something that Parliament hasn't given me the money to pay for. So I can't say "I promise" unless Parliament says "here's the money to back that up".

My friend Susan Lunn of CBC Radio and I have been invited by our friend Martin Stringer to join him on his weekly show, Prime Time Politics, tonight to talk about what turned out to be a relatively busy week in federal politics. There was Lisa Raitt's forgetful staffer, a major bank's prediction about a monster-sized deficit, and election buzz with Michael Ignatieff's musings earlier about a "clear and serene" decision he hopes to make next week about whether to bring the government down.

You can tune in at 8 pm ET or 5 pm PT on CPAC.