It is safe to say people interested in politics and most of Alberta woke up this morning a little bewildered.

There are jokes about hell really freezing over, since Edmonton enjoyed a May snowstorm overnight.

And there are no end of questions about what this all means, what impact it may have on the federal election, and what happens now. The markets are in a bit of turmoil because markets don't like change usually. Manitoba NDP staffers who have already been sharpening their resumes in the wake of the leadership drama, are likely to preparing to make a beeline for the new jobs opening in Alberta.

And on the Hill, the Alberta election result was all the talk as the parties gathered for the regular Wednesday morning caucus meetings. 

Manitoba Senator Don Plett was asked by a Conservative committee chair to "reconsider" an outburst at a Senate committee hearing this week in a discussion with a witness about a piece of union disclosure legislation. 

The Senate committee on legal and constitutional affairs met twice this week in consideration of Bill C-377. It is a private members' bill, that has the backing of the Prime Minister's Office, and require unions to publicly disclose financial information on spending, salaries and political activities.

Critics of the bill call it an all-out ideological assault on unions which would strip them of their ability to bargain by laying bare their finances including what they could pay workers in the event of a strike. 

The government, and the bill's backer, Conservative MP Russ Hiebert, say it's time there was sunshine shed on the finances of unions, which get taxpayer help because union dues are tax deductible and unions don't pay taxes on things such as investment income. 

Finance Minister Joe Oliver has been clear for several weeks the federal budget will be delayed until at least April hoping oil prices might stabilize so the government has a bit more certainty about its revenue estimates.

The federal budget is normally in February or March.

Some political tongue waggers however believe the government isn't really delaying the budget because it needs a more certain price of oil. It's because it is giving itself the opportunity to use the budget as a precursor to an early election call.

The federal election is supposed to be on Oct. 19, but nothing prevents Prime Minister Stephen Harper from going to the Governor General earlier than that.

It was just another normal day in Ottawa.

But then quite literally, hell broke loose.

I realized something crazy was happening as I arrived on Parliament Hill shortly before 10 a.m. and more RCMP cruisers than I knew were on the Hill began racing towards Centreblock. On Wellington Street, the road that runs in front of Parliament Hill, an RCMP cruiser screeched to a halt so quickly it left the smell of burnt rubber in the air, and the cop jumped out and began racing towards Centreblock with his hand on his gun.

I've seen police with their lights on not infrequently on the Hill, and usually it is an abundance of caution. A backpack left behind by accident by a tourist, being checked for explosives. A disturbance among protesters.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was like a five-year-old on Christmas morning Tuesday as he got to do what he, and many prime ministers before him, have wanted to do.

He got to announce that one of the longest historical mysteries in Canada had been solved. 

"This is a day of very good news," he began, seated at a table in a boardroom in Ottawa. "And that is that we have found one of the two Franklin ships." 

There was applause around the table, and as Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq sat beaming beside him, Harper did something he doesn't often do, at least in public.

For filing in the "that's pretty cool" folder, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen is heading underwater for an entire week on a mission that could simulate gravity conditions on Mars.

Hansen is one of a four-member "aquanaut" crew that will be living and working in the Aquarius habitat in Key Largo, Florida, an ocean laboratory located 20 metres under the surface of the ocean. The lab is usually used by marine biologists but for the next seven days it will be home to a number of NASA experiments as part of NEEMO 19. NEEMO stands for NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations.

Hansen, a 37-year-old from Ailsa Craig, Ont., is a former CF-18 fighter pilot who was selected in 2009 through the Canadian astronaut recruitment program. He graduated from NASA's astronaut training program in 2011 and currently works at NASA's Mission Control Centre in Houston. He is awaiting his first assignment to travel to space.

Hansen will be the exploration lead on the team, meaning he will oversee the planning and execution of underwater "spacewalks" which will simulat the communications between ground and astronaut crews in space. The walks will including experiments using varying levels of gravity such as that of asteroids, Martian moons and even Mars itself.

Political parties have always sent operatives to each other's events. It's bascially spying but it's not exactly covert. Often times opposing party MPs will even get accredited for another party's convention so they can get inside and be easily prepared to criticize whatever it is they see.

It makes everyone's life easier I suppose than to try and have your own people sneaking around to glean what the other parties are doing on a particular day. 

But the Liberals this week are accusing the Conservatives of taking it to the next level and planting young Conservative staffers in the audience to ask questions of Liberal MPs and candidates, hoping to get them to say something that contradicts what Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has said. 

It happened earlier this year with MP John McKay when he was asked about Trudeau's plan to not let anyone run for the Liberals who didn't support a woman's right to choose. It happened earlier this week when retired General Andrew Leslie, who is running for the Liberals in an Ottawa riding and is one of Trudeau's key policy advisors, was asked about the Israel-Hamas conflict. In both cases recordings of the responses were handed over to the media.

Manitoba politicians are getting in on the action as part of the ALS ice bucket challenge.

Regional minister Shelly Glover was nominated by her daughter and a small crowd of supporters cheered her on in front of the Norberry-Glenlee Community Centre Sunday when two volunteers dumped a blue recycling bin about one-third full of icy water onto her head.

 Glover posted the video on her Facebook page.

She then nominated three others, including Manitoba Conservative Senator Don Plett. Plett was at his family cottage in Buffalo Point, MB, but still rose to the chilly challenge. He tried to pretend he was mad at Glover for doing it to him.

For readers who are already convinced Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada are getting more than their fair share of attention, the events of recent days and those to come will do nothing to dispel those thoughts.

National and local stories in the last several days have been dominated by Trudeau. He visited Winnipeg last week so he got coverage in our paper for that. On Saturday his Ottawa home was broken into while his wife and kids slept, and a menacing note left behind. The coverage of that is still dominating national stories, including a question of whether or not he needs his own security detail.

This week Liberal MPs are meeting in Edmonton for a caucus meeting, generating coverage about a Liberal push in Alberta.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives have the fortune of being in government and therefore getting press simply by being the deciders. Harper’s annual arctic tour which kicks off later this week will get lots of coverage because he is the prime minister and he gets to go around announcing stuff people want.

| The latest poll on federal voting intentions probably has the Liberal Party of Canada enjoying this Monday a bit more than the Conservatives or the NDP.

The EKOS Politics poll has the Liberals narrowing in on majority territory if an election were held today, with 38.7 per cent support, compared to 25.6 per cent for the Conservatives and 23.4 per cent for the NDP. EKOS president Frank Graves said if these results were what happened on the next election day the current Conservative government would find itself not just out of government, but down in third place.

That’s thanks to the fact that the NDP vote is a bit more efficient in seat-rich Quebec, and the Conservative numbers are bolstered somewhat by its dominance in Alberta, where there are fewer seats to be had.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper likes Homer Simpson.

Or does he?

CBC reported over the long weekend that the fabled, donut-loving cartoon dad was among the 223 people Harper follows on Twitter.

Not long after, Simpson got the boot.

House of Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer is mulling over a point of privilege calling on him to let the House of Commons decide whether Manitoba MPs Shelly Glover and James Bezan should be allowed to sit and vote in the House until their dispute with Elections Canada over their 2011 election expenses is settled.

Both MPs are going to court to challenge Elections Canada's interpretation of how certain advertisements they bought as MPs had to be claimed during the 2011 writ period. Glover's case is set to be heard next week (June 21) and Bezan's in September.

The point is almost becoming moot since the House of Commons is sitting for a maximum of nine more days before rising for summer recess.

But it seems the two Manitobans are not the only MPs still under the microscope for their 2011 campaign expenses. Mississauga, Ont. Tory MP Eve Adams is defending herself today after it was revealed she claimed nearly $3,000 in personal expenses such as hair styling, a traffic ticket, manicures and expensive post-campaign victory dinners. Some claims seemed quite petty, like a less than $3 bill for a cupcake several weeks after the campaign was over.

The spin doctors are working hard today to disect the byelection results in Labrador yesterday.

Former Conservative cabinet minister Peter Penashue (pronounced Pen-A-shoo-way) went down to defeat at the hands of Liberal Yvonne Jones. Penashue stepped down in April, hours before Elections Canada released documents which showed his campaign in 2011 had accepted 28 illegal donations totalling $46,560, including from corporations and $18,710 of free flights from Provincial Airlines.

Trying to understand the results of this byelection in terms of what it may mean for the greater political situation in Canada today is kind of like trying to figure out whether the Titanic went down by looking how a life raft fares with an iceberg.

Labrador is a sparsely populated, community-oriented riding. So the Liberals trying to suggest this is a sign Canadians like Justin Trudeau and his message is at best premature. This is probably one of the most local ridings you can get in Canada. This was a byelection in which a well-known and popular politician prevailed for a party that has only ever lost this riding twice before. A byelection where the incumbent was in over his head when it came to figuring out how to finance an election (which makes the comment about Trudeau's inexperience seem rather ironic -- but that's a whole other story.)

 If there is a race in Ottawa to be the MP with the most to say, Manitoba's Kevin Lamoureux won the silver medal.

According to Samara Canada, a non-profit think tank aiming to improve political participation, an analysis of words spoken in the House of Commons in 2012 showed Lamoureux delivered 222,451 words last year, just a few thousand shy of the 226,027 words spoken by the NDP's Peter Julian.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May was in the bronze position with 174,783 words. The Conservatives' Kellie Leitch was in the usually unenviable fourth position with 120,835 words.

Samara's study looked at 54 days of debate in the House of Commons and then extrapolated to figure out how many words the MPs likely spoke over the full 129 days where the House of Commons sat last year.