Parliament has risen for what could be the last time before the October election

The 2019 election campaign is already underway — the CBC News Canada Votes newsletter is your weekly tip-sheet as we count down to Oct. 21.

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School's out: looking back at an eventful year in Parliament

Vassy Kapelos, host of Power & Politics

It's that time of year - that glorious time of year when we can all take a breath again.

The House has risen.

MPs have fled Ottawa, the federal political news cycle is winding down and our show has started panicking over how to fill two hours.

It's a time to look back on the sitting that was and review what the government did and didn't do - which pieces of legislation became law, which ones disappeared into the ether.

Some big stuff passed. Tanker bans, a new process for reviewing pipeline projects, pot pardons, national security laws. Despite the occasional ping-pong battle between the House and the Senate, at the end of the day it got done. Mostly.

(And in case you're keeping score - the Liberals passed 88 bills during this term, while the previous Tory government passed 122 bills over the course of its last majority mandate.)

Meanwhile, bills that would have mandated sexual assault training for judges, implemented the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and banned "unhealthy" food and beverage marketing directed at children failed to cross the finish line.

Are they gone for good? That's where the election comes in.

The chances are that some of the bills that died a painful death will be resuscitated after the upcoming election campaign. In some cases, political parties already have pledged to do so.

According to former Conservative Party interim leader Rona Ambrose, who was behind the bill to make sexual assault training mandatory for federally-appointed judges, the Liberals, Conservatives, New Democrats and Greens have all promised to re-introduce her bill as government legislation, should they form the next government.

Politically, that isn't surprising. Ambrose's bill passed unanimously in the House of Commons. It then headed to the Senate where it sat for two years and ultimately fell victim to Senate shenanigans. (We could have a long discussion about said shenanigans and the efficacy of the Senate, but I'll save that gem for another edition of this newsletter.)

The UNDRIP bill is another big one. This was a private member's bill, sponsored by NDP MP Romeo Saganash. It would have aimed to harmonize federal laws with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The bill was hotly contested in the Senate because of a provision that calls on states to obtain "free, prior and informed consent" before approving activity on Indigenous land, including natural resources extraction. Conservative senators said they feared the bill would amount to an Indigenous veto over major resource projects.

The government was criticized for not introducing the bill as its own, which might have allowed it to escape the fate suffered by other private member's bills. Once it became clear the Saganash bill wouldn't pass, the Liberals decided to add it to their fall election platform.

Other policy pitches, meanwhile, didn't even make it to the legislation stage during this mandate. Pharmacare and guns come to mind. The government tasked an advisory panel with looking into pharmacare and in the end it recommended a universal program. New Democrats already have said it'll be in their platform, Liberals haven't yet made the promise.

On gun control, another study was done, but it's not clear what the Liberals will promise - a full ban on handguns, or more powers for municipalities to do so?

Either way, all is not lost on the legislative floor, and we have some clues to what the fall will bring.

Vassy Kapelos is host of Power & Politics, weekdays at 5 p.m. ET on CBC News Network.

Have a question about the October election? About where the federal parties stand on a particular issue? Or about the facts of a key controversy on the federal scene? Email us your questions and we'll answer one in the next Canada Votes newsletter. Scroll down to see the answer to this week's question.

Power Lines

The Power & Politics Power Panelists on where the big parties will be focused this week

Amanda Alvaro  president and co-founder of Pomp & Circumstance

Liberals, on the heels of Pride weekend in Toronto, where they participated alongside hundreds of thousands of Canadians, will contrast with the unwillingness of Andrew Scheer's Conservatives to participate in Pride - and what that says about the Conservative Party's commitment to openness, diversity and inclusivity.

Stockwell Day former Conservative cabinet minister

Conservatives this week will continue to contrast their environmental message ("Use Tech Not Taxes") with the Liberals' message. On trade, the Conservatives will be reaching out to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, as she has added a wrinkle to the USMCA trade deal, suggesting more is needed on labour and climate before ratification.

Kathleen Monk  principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group

New Democrats will be promoting their "New Deal for People" as parties wave goodbye to the 42nd Parliament and kick their campaigns into high next gear. Jagmeet Singh will first travel to the battleground Greater Toronto Area, leveraging traditional NDP strength on health care to present his vision of expanding Medicare to cover Canadians from "head to toe."

Poll Tracker Takeaway

Éric Grenier's weekly look at key numbers in the political public opinion polls.

Justin Trudeau isn't likely to be given much credit in Alberta for finally approving the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project.

Albertans have pretty much made up their minds about the prime minister. They don't like him. Recent polls put his disapproval rating in the province somewhere between 74 and 81 per cent.

Many people are equally dismissive of the Liberals' chances of winning seats in Alberta in October, pipeline or no pipeline. But are the Liberals' chances there really as bad as some suggest?

The party certainly has taken a hit in the province. The Poll Tracker puts the Liberals at 16.9 per cent in Alberta, down 7.6 percentage points from 2015. The Conservatives are up 1.3 points in the province, to 60.9 per cent. Combined, that swing should make it difficult for the Liberals to hold any of the four seats they won in the province in 2015.

Difficult - not impossible.

There are three seats worth watching. The Liberals won Calgary Centre by just 1.2 points, but MP Kent Hehr is routinely one of the best fundraisers in the country.

Edmonton Centre, held by Liberal MP Randy Boissonnault, was won by just 2.2 points. But the New Democrats captured 24.5 per cent of the vote in the riding and finished third. Now that the NDP is in survival mode, that could mean a lot of votes up for grabs.

If progressives in Edmonton Centre vote strategically, Boissonnault could benefit. There certainly are a lot of them in the riding — the Alberta NDP took the majority of ballots cast in the ridings that make up the federal seat in the provincial election held earlier this year.

The provincial NDP did just as well in Edmonton Strathcona, which has been held by the federal NDP's Linda Duncan since 2008.

But Duncan won't be on the ballot this fall. Nearly 65 per cent of voters in Strathcona supported either the NDP or the Liberals here in 2015. If the NDP's vote collapses, there could be an opening for the Liberals.

They'll still need to fight hard to hold any seats in Alberta, but Trans Mountain improves their chances from slim-to-none to just slim. In this province, a Trudeau will take those odds any day.

Tap here to go to the full poll tracker

Ask us

We want to know what YOU want to know

Communik8e on Instagram asked: Who are the 13 "social media influencers" hired by Elections Canada?

It might be more accurate to ask: Who were they?

Elections Canada, the independent, non-partisan agency that conducts federal elections, had announced a plan to hire 13 influential Canadians to help get out information to young people on how to register to vote in the fall election.

The plan involved paying the 13 individuals to record videos to share on social media platforms before the official campaign period.

But the plan was attacked by Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre as "the Liberal lapdogs at Elections Canada" hiring "paid influencers to intervene in the campaign."

On Thursday, the head of Elections Canada said the plan was dead.

Chief Electoral Officer Stephane Perrault said a fourth round of background vetting found that some of the influencers' "past activities" could have been perceived as partisan — so the agency decided to drop the project.

"It was clear from the outset that it had to be beyond any reproach, beyond any possible interpretation that, whether for lifestyle choices, or comments, or pictures, that these could be tied to a particular partisan point of view," Perrault told Chris Hall, host of CBC Radio's The House.

For reasons of transparency, Perrault provided the list of Elections Canada's erstwhile influencers - who reportedly had already been paid:

• Ashley Callingbull, actor, model and First Nations activist.
• Andre De Grasse, Olympic sprinter.
• Mitch Hughes, YouTuber.
• Katherine Levac, comedian.
• Elle Mills, YouTuber.
• Maripier Morin, TV host and model.
• Alex Nevsky, singer-songwriter.
• Penny Oleksiak, Olympic swimmer.
• Nicolas Ouellet, TV host.
• Max Parrot, Olympic snowboarder.
• Thanh Phung, lifestyle/family blogger.
• Lilly Singh, YouTuber and talk show host.
• Maayan Ziv, photographer, disability issues activist and founding CEO of AccessNow.

Have a question about the October election? About where the federal parties stand on a particular issue? Or about the facts of a key controversy on the federal scene? Email us your questions and we'll answer one in the next Canada Votes newsletter.

The 2019 election campaign is already underway — the CBC News Canada Votes newsletter is your weekly tip-sheet as we count down to Oct. 21.

Reading this online? Sign-up for the newsletter and receive it every Sunday.