After a long summer break Parliament returns on Monday, and all the political parties are revving up their engines.
A splashy, campaign-style launch for the government's fall agenda, a surprise tax cut for small business owners, a brand new NDP battle cry and a prime-time speech from Justin Trudeau: welcome to the 2015 election season.
With Parliament poised to resume on Monday, all three main political parties are clearly revving their political engines on the road to the next vote, currently scheduled to take place some 12 months from now.
For it will mark the official beginning of the next election campaign and Stephen Harper couldn't make that clearer by turning the occasion into a party.
With one week to go in the Scottish referendum the YES side's surge to independence appears to have been at least temporarily halted, with a new poll suggesting the NO side is leading again.
The YouGov survey for The Times and Sun newspapers put supporters of the union on 52 per cent, narrowly ahead of supporters of independence on 48 per cent, excluding those who said they did not know how they would vote.
But with 97% of those eligible registered to vote, either side could still win.
And the good news for the YES side is that most of its support is still intact even after being battered by an all-out assault worthy of Darth Vader himself...
It's so bizarre, so crazy, it could only happen in a ghastly corrupted state like Harperland,.
Or spring from the increasingly desperate and deluded mind of Stephen Harper.
For what else can explain that on Tuesday his propaganda machine would release a video bragging about all the jobs Great Economist Leader has created.
Only to prepare to deploy the useless Joe Oliver on Thursday, to announce that, hello Houston, the Cons have a job creation problem.
I knew Terri-Jean Bedford was going to get a rough ride, or a verbal spanking, from the Cons on the Senate committee studying the dangerously flawed prostitution bill.
After all, she was one of the three applicants who brought down Canada's prostitution law last December.
And as you know, the Cons in the Senate are a moralistic bunch.
But who knew that they would throw her right out of the room?
I suppose by now I shouldn't be surprised by anything Rob Ford says or does.
Because that ghastly Con has been crawling through a sewer from the moment he came to office.
And the very sight of him offends me, as it should all decent people.
But I still thought that getting an endorsement from Mike Tyson was another low moment.
It was just two weeks ago that Stephen Harper was talking about the search for the lost Franklin expedition.
And how he couldn't wait to find, in his macabre words, "the skeleton of Franklin slumped over the helm."
And today he did.
Or a least a team of researchers did find one of the ships.
It's been hard trying to explain that what's going on in Scotland is a bigger story than many progressives in this country can imagine.
And that they should rejoice at the last minute surge of the YES side, because they are fighting for our kind of values, and we can use some of the lessons of their campaign to defeat the Harper regime in the next election.
Because as soon as I mention the word "referendum" some people start muttering incoherently, and when I mention the word YES they think Quebec separatists. And either start screaming, or moaning, or mumbling stuff like:
No. No. Not again. Not the NEVERENDUM !#@!!!!
Which is a pity, because even though its happening in a small country it really is a huge story.
He is not supposed to call an election until October 19, 2015 according to his own fixed-date election law.
But everybody knows that Stephen Harper won't hesitate to hold one if and when it suits him.
The question is what excuse will he use to trigger an election?
And could it be a clash with the federal public service unions?
I've been seeing a lot of stories in the Canadian and British media, comparing the Scottish independence referendum campaign to the one in Quebec in 1995.
And I've resigned myself to seeing a lot more of them after this latest development.
Because it is so familiar.
But here's the thing eh? I've seen the Scottish referendum campaign up close and in the flesh this summer, in this quiet northern place where my family lives...
I lived through the Quebec one in Montreal, in the crucible of the clash between the YES and the NO.
And I can tell you that while the campaigns may be superficially similar, they are at their core radically different.
Well as you know the young fanatics in the PMO are desperately trying to improve Stephen Harper's image. Frantically trying to put a fresh coat of lipstick on it, before the next election campaign.
But it's all going horribly wrong.
Trying to portray Harper as a Great Strong Leader, who is almost as fresh and just as pretty as Justin Trudeau, AND a Mr Nice Guy, just isn't working eh?
No matter how hard they try. No matter how hard the PMO pit bull Jenni Byrne screams or grunts...
So now a former PMO member has come up with the wildest and most desperate idea yet.
Rebrand Harper as Steve Nickelback.
