Inkless Irregulars

Inkless Irregular Jack Mitchell is in serious danger of going home with all the non-existent steak knives in our First Annual frequent whenever I feel like it Inkless Research Quiz. Recall that we were looking for examples of Anglosphere political leaders explaining the dangers of fixed deadlines for Afghanistan (or Iraq) troop withdrawals. Here’s the memorable quote Jack found:

And there’s only one question:

Under the subject line “Election — CPC convention scuppered,” this email landed in the Inkless inbox tonight:

If the Prime Minister is to be discouraged from dumping major policy documents onto the Internet in the middle of the night at the end of the session six weeks after they should have been ready, the only thing that will do the trick is the knowledge that such clandestine behaviour will not spare him the journalistic scrutiny he is clearly trying to avoid. My own poor effort was not going to do do it. And I am sad to say that after a spate of early stories simply recording the fact of the late-night document dump, Harper’s instinct has been confirmed by a near-total lack of journalistic scrutiny. (The Ottawa Citizen‘s David Pugliese, as is almost always the case, remains the honourable exception. Here is his blog post on the defence plan. I suspect more is on the way.)

(UPDATED: Good stuff in the comments. – pw)

The mystery deepens. In my last post I pointed out that, if the Brits are cutting Commonwealth Scholarships for Canadians, Canada can hardly complain, having cut Commonwealth Scholarships for Brits in 2006. But then the ball takes an interesting bounce, and I’d be grateful for the help of you Inkless Irregulars — especially the access-to-education division, Rob and Alex and others — in helping me follow where it landed.

From Emmett McFarlane, a doctoral candidate at Queen’s and a former editor of The Gazette at the UWO (so we like him), comes this email about the recent committee unpleasantness regarding the Tories’ Senate-reform bill, C-20: