However, there were storm clouds gathering on the Liberal horizon last week, in relation to the showdown between the House of Commons and the Senate on who actually controls public spending powers.

With the House of Commons adjourning for the summer, time for a look in the rearview mirror at four leading MPs who were on their game over the first half of the parliamentary year ... and at one who was off.

Scott Brison tried to spin how great it would be that some mundane briefing lists, mandate letters, and ministers' expenses would become legally available as part of a take-it-or-leave-it government publication scheme.

There are other troubled Phoenix-like projects under way that could implode at any moment. If Trudeau wants to protect his government against such future debacles, he needs to make it safe for honest public servants to share what they know.

Several billion dollars have already been earmarked for this purpose in budgets 2016 and 2017, as part of the bigger goals for Canada in clean-tech, which covers other environmental needs as well as energy.

Catherine McKenna can keep asking but all she will get are the same non-answers. It is a classic standoff between a first-term minister and a canny bureaucracy. We shall see who blinks first.

There is an opportunity for the federal Health minister to demonstrate that she is serious about the health of Canadians and it isn’t by focusing on excessive and ineffective measures that will only make it easier for illegal traffickers to counterfeit legal products.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland also has a new press secretary, while Status of Women Minister Maryam Monsef has bade farewell to hers.

‘Of course people are getting tired. It’s only natural. But they’re willing to do it, and they know why they’re here,’ says NDP Whip Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet.

Modern death has become a wrenching political dilemma, one that grows more pressing as the population ages. A Good Death confronts our fears about dying, our struggle for meaning, and our dread of being trapped by voracious medical technology in a nightmare world that has abandoned caring in pursuit of curing, no matter the cost or the suffering to patients and their families. A Good Death asks the tough question none of us can avoid: How do we want to die?