Must-reads: Jonathan Kay on Gage Guimond; Rosie DiManno on the Robert Baltovich trial.

Enter the idealists
Three wide-eyed new Liberal MPs skip into Parliament. Parliament prepares to crush their spirits.

The Toronto Star's James Travers breaks down the cliques on Parliament Hill: there are "the achievers," who are "determined to advance themselves and/or the country and somehow overcome crushing odds to succeed"; there are "the lifers," who are happy to pad their pensions and not rock the boat; and there are "the optimists," who come to Ottawa "eager to innovate and leave bruised and wiser." Bob Rae and Martha Hall Findlay are clearly achievers, he says, and Joyce Murray might turn out to be as well. But the only reason she's there is because Stephen Owen, the outgoing MP for Vancouver-Quadra, was one of the optimists, Travers suggests, and couldn't take it anymore. No small transfusion of new blood can halt Parliament's slide from "utility into dysfunction," he assures us.

"The most startling news" in Stephen Harper's minor Cabinet shuffle last month was that Helena Guergis "wasn't on the dumped list," says the Calgary Herald's Don Martin. Since then she's burst into tears in front of visiting female Afghan parliamentarians; run away from interviews she's promised to conduct, and woefully mismanaged the case of Brenda Martin, the Canadian woman imprisoned in Mexico for two years awaiting trial. Don Martin has run this by some women, he'll have us know, to ensure it's not just a "pale male pile-on"—which it isn't. "The 1992 Miss Huronia"—as he refers to her—"should be removed before her amateur antics and strange behaviour trigger an international incident."

It's all very well for the Canadian Space Agency to start a new astronaut recruiting drive, says Sun Media's Greg Weston. But it only highlights the biggest current issue in Canadian spaceology—the proposed $1.35 billion sale of MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates, inventors of the Canadarm and the super-cool Radarsat satellites and recipients of untold hundreds of millions in taxpayer money, to American interests. "The Harper government's immediate mission should be a public debate on whether Canada should even have a space program," Weston argues.

The National Post's Jonathan Kay looks at the short, distinctly un-Canadian life of Gage Guimond—a toddler from Manitoba's Sagkeeng First Nation who was shuttled from foster family to foster family, enduring "alcohol abuse and squalor" at every turn. A "safe home run by competent parents" was ready to take him in, Kay notes, but as is too often the case, child services officials were biased towards foster parents from the child's tribe. Kay hopes proposed legislation to clarify that a child's "best interests" include his "safety" will pass, but he also "hope[s] the issue spurs a wider dialogue about native policy." As he says, Gage's plight "personifies Kacheshewan, Peguis, Natuashish, Yellow Quill and a hundred other … native communities whose populations are languishing under similar pretexts."

Jean Charest on top of the world… for now
March was supposed to be one potential disaster after another for the Quebec Premier, Don MacPherson writes in the Montreal Gazette: his leadership review; the party's delicate balancing act between soft-ethnic nationalism and its old-school federalist base; the budget and its attendant election-risk; and politically sensitive reports on reasonable accommodations and the status of the French language. "Not only did he survive it," MacPherson, marvels, "he thrived."

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