But really, do they need to lord it over their opponents while announcing what should be a wholly non-partisan initiative - sending aid to Burma?
Read the press release put out by the Canadian International Development Agency (Bev Oda, prop.) this afternoon. Can you sense the ALL-CAPS "told-you-so" attitude when CIDA points out that this aid is travelling to Burma via ONE of our FOUR C-17s?

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... That prompts Kevin Bausch, the director of the Liberal Research Bureau, to heckle Flaherty from the sidelines. At these committee meetings (this one was in West Block 269), staffers for the Opposition sit on chairs lined up one side of the room and the Conservative staffers sit on the other side. Bausch had chimed in a few times during this rather raucous meeting and was doing it again while Flaherty was giving McCallum the gears. This apparently infuriated the young and impetuous Rossano Bernardi, the recently installed director of Parliamentary Affairs for Flaherty . . .   more »

Proposed changes to Canada's employment insurance system could leave it short billions of dollars if the economy takes a turn for the worse, a deficit that workers and employers would have to make up for with sharply increased premiums, says a former chief actuary for the fund. Michel Bedard, who was chief actuary for the federal employment insurance fund through much of the 1990s, says new rules proposed by the Conservative government ostensibly designed to eliminate the accumulation of billions of dollars of surpluses could, in fact, leave the EI fund billions short...   more »