DELAY TACTICS: The NDP's Rob Fleming honoured Environment Minister Barry Penner this week with his first-ever "Ragging the Puck" Award.

After a frustrating session spent grilling Penner about his budget, Fleming checked the official record to see how much time the minister wasted checking with staff before answering questions.

According to Hansard, the session lasted 220 minutes -- 102 minutes of which was used by Penner to "confer or recess on basic questions like, 'How many (full-time employees) are being cut from the ministry's environmental protection branch,' " Fleming said in an email to Press Pass.

The longest pause lasted nearly 15 minutes.

"Barry Penner has been the minister of the environment for five years," Fleming said. "Why are the training wheels still on his bicycle?"

RARE VOTE -- Gallery watchers were taken aback this week when a Liberal MLA rose to vote against one of his party's own bills. Backbencher Norm Letnick (Kelowna-Lake Country) dared break with party lines to cast a nay against government legislation that would force homeless people into shelters during extreme weather.

This rare event, which occurs almost as often as a total solar eclipse, was somewhat tempered by Letnick's speech, which, at length, listed government's accomplishments to fight homelessness before finally concluding, "While the goal is noble, the implementation of the legislation as proposed has a potential to do more harm than good."

Not exactly a stinging attack against his own government, but nonetheless a seldom-seen attempt by an MLA to think outside party lines.

LOVE THE LAW -- Social development minister Rich Coleman dipped into the "if you can't beat them with logic, start calling them names" school of debate this week, after getting quizzed about confusion surrounding his warrants for welfare legislation.

When the NDP pointed out the bill will apply to all sorts of minor offences, and not just serious warrants as government has claimed, Coleman concluded that the critique must come from a loving embrace between NDP MLAs and street-level ne'er-do-wells.

"These guys, it's just unbelievable their love affair with the criminal," he said. "They just want to find every way for a criminal to never have to face up to anything.

"They just love the criminal -- that's too bad, because I quite frankly don't. We're just of different minds on this one."

Right. Now, back to reality ...

THE MINISTER HAS NO CLOTHES -- Let's take a small moment to thank the good folks at Hansard, who were unable (or hopefully unwilling) to enter into the official record all the snide jokes made recently about a naked Kevin Krueger. The topic came up Thursday when NDP critic Spencer Herbert asked Krueger, the tourism minister, why Tourism B.C. had been axed.

On the one side, tourism organizations think it's a stupid decision, said Herbert. "And then on the other side we have the minister of tourism caught naked with no study or analysis supporting his axing of Tourism B.C."

"I know it's a disturbing image," Herbert quickly added. "But who should we believe, minister?"

MLAs leapt at the chance to strip bare this imagery and massage it for all manner of dirty jokes. "My colleagues are urging me to resist the temptation," Krueger chuckled. "Oh, the burns that spring to mind."

Mercifully, Hansard editors distilled the dirty jokes into five lines of "interjections" by members in the official record.

BLACKOUT BEEF A BUST -- Herbert rang the alarm earlier this month about a leaked voice mail.

He staged a full-scale news conference to play a voice mail left by a former deputy minister at Tourism B.C. in 2008. It referred to "getting the B.C. message out" during a blackout period.

Herbert suggested it referred to the blackout period during election campaigns and wrote to Elections B.C. demanding an investigation.

That independent office was unmoved by the voice mail. An official there said they reviewed Herbert's letter and found no evidence of any contravention and no investigation has started.

LEST WE FORGET . . . POLITICS -- Richmond New Democratic Party constituency associations struck a crass note last week, by linking Remembrance Day to an anti-HST rally.

They ran an ad in the local paper under the heading "Take Time to Remember" that featured a picture of a group of war-weary soldiers.

It said the associations commemorate all those who lost their lives defending freedom.

Then came the political pitch.

"Please join us in exercising these hard-won freedoms at a free public forum on the HST. MLA Bruce Ralston is our featured speaker..."