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If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, the Harper government must be broad-minded indeed.

As the NDP's Don Davies pointed out in an op-ed the other day, Harper advocates free trade while raising tariffs.

On the Syrian conflict, the Prime Minister describes the prospect of intervention as a "grotesque dilemma" one day, then, a few days later, laces into the Syrian regime's close friend, Russia's Putin, using the kind of gratuitously aggressive and dismissive language other G-7 leaders generally eschew.

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Soon the Parliamentary session will give way to festival season in Ottawa.

There will be a dance festival, fringe festival, chamber music (two festivals for that), folk and blues festivals, an Italian street festival, a hot-air balloon festival, and, of course, the inevitable jazz fest.

Jazz festivals -- starting at Newport, Rhode lsland, in the 1950s -- have been around for a very long time. They are charter members of the festival club.

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The Rideau Institute, an Ottawa-based think tank, gave a leadership award on Wednesday to Steven Shrybman, the lawyer who handled the so-called 'robocall' court case.

Shrybman represented six Canadians who sought to overturn the 2011 election in their ridings because of fraud.

In one sense, he and the six lost that case.

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The Conservative government is now running Orwellian television ads touting its environmental record.

After reducing the federal environmental role to virtually nothing, radically limiting fisheries protection, scrapping the Navigable Waters Act, chopping the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, and withdrawing from the Kyoto Accord, the Harper government now wants to convince Canadians it is has a strong environmental record.

That effort is a textbook case of chutzpah.