Travel alert — visitors to the Ottawa airport should exercise caution mid-week lest they be steamrolled by Conservative MPs scrambling through the departure gates to get the heck out of Dodge.

It’s not unusual for government problems to pile up as a Parliamentary session lurches to a finish, but if this government was hoping for a clean getaway, it still has three of those problems on its plate before its Christmas exodus.

After having a weekend almost exclusively to its own to massage its message on the approved takeover of Nexen by a Chinese state-owned company, it has still left enough holes in its carefully calibrated rollout for opposition exploitation beginning Monday.

Before the House rises, the new price tag on the F-35 fighter jets will be officially announced, and calls for Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s resignation will likely ring out anew in the Commons.

And beginning Monday morning, Federal Court begins what could be a week-long hearing on allegations of orchestrated Conservative vote suppression in six federal ridings during the 2011 election.

The Conservatives will tough it out before piling into cabs for the airport, all three issues will go into deep holiday freeze, but here’s betting all three will endure in 2013 and likely into the 2015 election campaign.

The approval of the $15.1 billion CNOOC takeover of Nexen is a done deal, but there are ambiguities which should be raised by the opposition NDP. (The Liberals are in a different position because their front-running leadership candidate, Justin Trudeau, had already pre-emptively signalled his approval of the takeover.)

But the NDP, which just as pre-emptively signalled its opposition, has public opinion on its side and should push the Conservatives on questions of environmental protection and human rights, both of which, according to Industry Minister Christian Paradis, are covered off by the fact that CNOOC will be subject to Canadian laws and report to him once a year.

Similar assurances have been tossed to the wind by companies from friendlier countries — hello, U.S. Steel.

There should also be legitimate questions about the Stephen Harper dictum that state-owned enterprises will not be allowed to take over oil patch entities except in undefined “exceptional circumstances.’’

On Global’s The West Block, opposition leader Tom Mulcair took issue with the deal.

“What does (exceptional circumstances) mean?’’ he said. “When it’s Friday? Is that an exceptional circumstance?”

The F-35s, we will learn this week, will cost more than $45 billion over 42 years, about $1 billion per year, but if Canadians have become inoculated against such huge numbers they should not be inoculated against the skullduggery which has accompanied this procurement program.

The government spent two years trying to discredit opposition politicians, most notably Liberals, the Parliamentary budget officer, retired civil servants and journalists who raised legitimate questions about the costs of the fighter jets.

They attacked the patriotism of their detractors and campaigned under false pretenses until stopped in their tracks by Auditor-General Michael Ferguson, so they have now hit the “reset” button on the program — even if they ultimately do choose the F-35, which is not dead yet.

But the government’s credibility on the issue is dead and the independent KPMG study the government will release will only reinforce that view.

Finally, Monday, lawyers for voters in six Conservative-held ridings will be in court to ask that the 2011 election results be set aside because there was evidence that voters were sent to the wrong polling stations in a bid to keep them from voting for other candidates.

This may finally turn out to be all thunder and no lightning and the bar for overturning election results must be very high, as the government’s lawyer will argue.

The government will argue that the case brought by the left-of-centre Council of Canadians is a “publicity stunt” and politically-motivated and it will attempt to discredit pollster Frank Graves of EKOS research as partisan, because it is his research that found that supporters of other parties were more likely to receive deceptive phone calls than Conservative supporters.

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But the very fact that is being aired in a courtroom for a week will put the so-called “robocalls” controversy back on the political agenda just as the Conservatives are heading out of town for the Christmas break.

They are betting none of these issues will come up over holiday dinners in Canadian homes, and maybe they’re right. But they will still be revisited by the ghosts of Policies Past.

Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca

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