Quebec is back on the ice and it is long overdue. Six ministers from Quebec, three of them from Montreal.

The makeup of this new federal cabinet really is quite remarkable.

It paints a landscape of Canadiana. It is a diverse dynamic and a team with very few career politicians.

Canada’s new justice minister is an aboriginal woman from B.C.

It is wonderful news. She is the first native to hold that post.

Jody Wilson-Raybould has been a First Nations leader and a crown prosecutor, working in some the grittiest areas of Vancouver.

She has seen what it is like for people to fall through the cracks and to be marginalized, and she is the right person to oversee aboriginal justice issues -- especially the promised inquiry into missing and murdered women.

Our new defence minister is a decorated retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Canadian Armed forces and a former street cop.

Harjit Sajjan was the first Sikh to command a Canadian army regiment and he now runs Canada’s armed forces.

Not bad at all for the man born in a small impoverished village in India, not bad at all for someone who once was denied a job with the RCMP because he wears a turban, not bad for someone who dealt with a lifetime of racial intolerance. Not bad indeed.

It’s a cabinet where men and women sit in equal numbers.

This is not about quotas, and those who raise that red herring maybe don’t accept that the job of governing will no longer be left solely to old white guys.

Although it is regrettable five of the portfolios given to women are junior ministries, they are still at the table and will still make a difference.

And the PM had the best line when asked about his gender parity cabinet: Because it’s 2015.

There will be mistakes along the way. Ministers will resign and at some point, the honeymoon will be over but for now, it looks like we have a government which understands the word “respect.“

It somehow hearkens back to a kinder Canada that many of us used to know.

Charter of Values? Not in this Canada

The cabinet must be giving the Parti Quebecois nightmares.

This isn’t exactly what they had in mind with their Charter of Values.

Chief Charter architect Bernard Drainville must be a corner whimpering somewhere, with two cabinet ministers wearing items that would make them ineligible to be public servants in his Quebec.

To see Quebec participating once again in national governance must be like fingernails on a chalkboard for the PQ.

This brings us to one of the last acts of the last Pequiste government.

This week saw the tabling of a report commissioned by outgoing Premier Pauline Marois.

Marois decided that $25,000 of your money would be spent on tearing a strip off Quebec City radio stations who were deemed to be anti-PQ. 

The report by failed PQ candidate and former Radio-Canada reporter Dominique Payette, released Wednesday, found that the talk shows had much to do with the PQ electoral humiliation in April 2014.

Isn’t it great to find a scapegoat for your own failures Madame Marois? And to use our money to do it? The Soviets had nothing on you.

The $600,000 gazebo

Speaking of money, Mr. Mayor please do something.

The price tag on restoring the tiny Mordecai Richler gazebo has risen now to almost $600,000.

You can pick up a pretty fine house in Montreal for that price and one with a new gazebo thrown in.

The culture of spend, spend, spend is still with us, Mr Coderre.

This is an embarrassment.

And a growing insult to the memory of one of Canada’s finest writers.