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• There was the release of Omar Khadr from jail, an event as inevitable as it was predicted, but against which the Harper government has battled, futilely, for years. Governments of both parties, Liberal and Conservative, conspired in his interrogation, prosecution and incarceration at Guantanamo, as a juvenile, long after every other of its Western inmates had been released, in splendid disregard of his rights under either the Canadian or American constitution.

But it is the Harper government that has been the most eager to politicize the matter. With its case collapsed and Khadr released on bail, the Public Safety Minister, Steven Blaney, was careful to issue a statement noting that Trudeau had “refused to rule out special compensation for this convicted terrorist” while “the NDP actively tries to force Canadian taxpayers to compensate him.”

• There was the introduction of yet another omnibus budget bill, this one a comparatively slender 157 pages — a third the length of some of its predecessors — but packed as usual with many disparate pieces of legislation, 27 in all, only some of which were remotely budget-related. The current bill would authorize the government, inter alia, to take away the passports of suspected terrorists, to create a new police force for Parliament Hill, and to impose changes to the sick-leave provisions of public sector unions’ contracts, theoretically still being negotiated.

• There was the publication of a report by the prime minister’s former lawyer, Benjamin Perrin, attacking another piece of government legislation, the proposed Life Means Life Act, with its prescription of a mandatory minimum sentence for certain types of murder of life in prison without possibility of parole, ever. As written, the law would give neither judges nor parole boards any discretion in such cases, a provision Perrin argued was likely to be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional.