GET-IT-DONE WEEK — The federal government's most reliable annual pre-holiday exercise is underway in Ottawa: finalize and announce as many programs and measures as possible to maximize content in year-end updates for constituents.
— Spotted: Bill C-65 — aka the Affordable Housing and Groceries Act — adopted last night at third reading. — Dental care: When four Cabinet ministers show up with billions in government spending, you can bet their announcement will rank highly on year-end Liberal comms. MARK HOLLAND, SEAMUS O'REGAN, TERRY BEECH and JEAN-YVES DUCLOS joined Liberal MP MONA FORTIER at Ottawa's Algonquin College. The big shiny boon was a five-year, C$13 billion plan to roll out subsidized dental services to millions of uninsured Canadians — a program that will cover things like polishing, X-rays, fillings, root canals, dentures and extractions. The feds say the annual cost to the treasury will settle at about C$4.4 billion — a hefty budget line that has ballooned since the government dipped its toes into dental care in the 2022 federal budget. Tory MP ADAM CHAMBERS has struggled to follow the money. → 2025 watch: Seniors, kids under 18, and Canadians with disabilities whose household income clocks in at less than C$90,000 will all be eligible by mid-2024. Everybody else who is eligible will see coverage in 2025 — ideal timing for a Liberal Party looking for campaign themes, assuming the life of the government lasts that long. → Look over here! NDP MP DON DAVIES hoovered up all the credit he could. The NDP's health critic can credibly claim none of the ministers would be in the room if not for the Liberal-NDP supply and confidence deal that identified dental care as a priority. Davies took his message loudly and proudly to question period, too. Next up: legislation to get rolling on national pharmacare, which will miss an end-of-year deadline tucked into the Liberal-NDP agreement. — Safe sports: Following a year of alarming headlines about unsafe sport in Canada, Sport Minister CARLA QUALTROUGH launched the Future of Sport in Canada Commission on Monday. Earlier this year, athletes lamented a lack of focus in Ottawa on abuse and misconduct. "We're dealing with a complex array of abuse, harassment, discrimination [and] normalized behavior that is very inappropriate," Qualtrough told CBC News, adding that it adds up to a "systemic problem" and a "crisis." Qualtrough, a minister known for acknowledging past mistakes (a rarity in Ottawa), told reporters she wishes she’d acted sooner. "I'm sorry I didn't dig in before in my first go around on this job," she said. "It was not the issue that was top of mind. It was absolutely going on, looking back. But yeah, I probably should have dug deeper, but my focus at that time was concussions." → What's next: The commissioner and a pair of "special advisers" will be selected next year. The commission will hold meetings with victims, academic experts and other sports stakeholders, convene a national summit, and complete a final report within 18 months on how to fix what ails Canadian athletes. — First Nations water: Indigenous Services Minister PATTY HAJDU introduced a bill five years in the making meant to give Indigenous communities more power to control and protect their own water supplies. Hajdu's announcement wasn't politics-free. The minister called the former Harper government's clean water bill "cynical, political and useless." Hajdu took a shot at BRIAN JEAN, an Alberta Cabinet minister who sat in Harper's caucus, for praising industry only a few months after a leak at Imperial Oil's Kearl oil sands mine went unreported for months. → Five-year process: The Assembly of First Nations condemned it as soon as it became the law of the land. In 2018, the AFN launched an engagement process on a new law. But some communities complained they weren't consulted in that process. Hajdu committed to hearing from more voices as Bill C-61 winds its way through Parliament. → The stats: Hajdu noted that 105 long-term drinking water advisories plagued First Nations communities when the Liberal took power in 2015. The government's latest data claims 143 long-term advisories have been removed over eight years, though 28 of them persisted in 26 communities as of August. | 
