Kathleen Wynne couldn’t have asked for a softer landing in Monday’s newspapers. Overwhelmingly, Wynne’s positive message—the legislature should find the common ground its legislators know exists—carried the day. The premier-designate’s olive branch to Tory leader Tim Hudak drowned out the early whispers of an attack ad focused squarely on Wynne’s leadership. Even the undesirable moments of the Liberal’s weekend gathering, including the convention-floor lying and horse-trading among competing camps that eventually produced a winner, only cracked a couple of stories.

Twitter lit up when the Toronto Star shed some light on one point of controversy: former frontrunner Sandra Pupatello apparently courted fellow leadership candidate Eric Hoskins with a sponge cake that, the paper adds, was “iced in hazelnut butter cream with a dark chocolate ganache glaze”—oh, and she also apparently “redirected” about $20,000 in donations to the Hoskins campaign, a point buried in the Star story. Anyway, the overtures were all for naught: Wynne won, as did her sunny outlook. For a few days, Queen’s Park reporters have pushed the litany of Liberal scandals into a closet, and given the new premier a moment to introduce herself to the province. It can’t be long until the doors burst open anew.

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What’s above the fold this morning?

The Globe and Mail leads with New Brunswick Premier David Alward’s wholehearted support for a west-east pipeline in Canada. The National Post fronts a fraudulent Canadian energy company’s enlistment of former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s law firm to advance the company’s interests in Africa. The Toronto Star goes above the fold with a poll foreshadowing Mayor Rob Ford’s vulnerability to Olivia Chow, John Tory and Karen Stintz in hypothetical contests—though he’d handily beat former baseball slugger Jose Canseco. The Ottawa Citizen leads with Ontario premier-designate Kathleen Wynne’s promise to get the provincial legislature back to work as soon as possible. iPolitics fronts 13 bills to watch in 2013, including MP Russ Hiebert’s union transparency bill. CBC.ca leads with the juxtaposition of the fresh sitting of Parliament and ongoing Idle No More protests. National Newswatch showcases a National Post story about a Liberal Party study that says Canada could become a tourist hot spot for pot smokers.

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Stories that will be (mostly) missed

1. Drones. RCMP in Saskatchewan are planning to purchase three advanced helicopter-style surveillance drones, known as Qubes, from a prominent American manufacturer.	2. EI benefits. The Federal Court of Appeal ruled that a Manitoba grandmother who took time off work to care for and eventually adopt a grandchild was entitled to EI benefits.
3. Nortel. A group of ex-Nortel employees wants millions of dollars worth of professional fees, withdrawn from the company’s estate without their consent, to be independently audited.	4. Astronomy. A group of Canadian scientists in B.C. is using an $11.5-million telescope to try to explain why the universe, at some point, suddenly started to expand more quickly.

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