The prime minister is returning Sunday from the annual meeting of the world's richest nations, the G8, and it would be interesting to know what they were telling one another in their private one-on-one conversations about the prospects for the global economy.
On CTV's , Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said he was "quite worried" about the economy slipping back into something resembling a recession.
Flaherty is clearly concerned about European nations overburdened with debt, the prospect of a slow-down in China and an increasingly sluggish outlook in the U.S. He will be meeting with private-sector economists on Tuesday to assess whether he will have to amend his projections for Canada's economic growth.
Although the finance minister has said many times that his June 6 federal budget will be pretty much the same as the one Parliament was ready to defeat back in March, many had assumed it would exclude the concessions NDP Leader Jack Layton had squeezed out of the Conservatives.
In the end Layton decided to vote against the budget because, although many of his demands were included, the money attached to them was far less than he wanted.
Just to prove they really believed in it, however, the Conservatives will retain nearly $1 billion in spending for homeowner grants on energy-saving refits, the guaranteed income supplement, and for doctors and nurses who work in the North. Layton may want to take authorship of those provisions.
MPs return to Ottawa this week
When the post-election House of Commons returns Thursday, it is going to look dramatically different. It will be younger, more ethnically diverse and viewers of the daily question period will see a lot more women -- and significantly more of them in important jobs.
Some of the changes will be less obvious but more significant.
The Conservatives, ever since they grew out of the old Reform Party, have been strongly western based; now, however, they will be dominated as much by Ontario.
As for the NDP, which has always been a party anchored in English-speaking Canada and locked out of Quebec, they are now dominated by that French-speaking province. Jack Layton will have the tricky task of having to defend Quebec's interest as vigorously as Gilles Duceppe ever did, but he will have to do it as a leader of a federalist party. He is already having issues as he transitions himself into a Quebec leader.
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