After a summer blissfully free of Parliamentary backbiting, finger-pointing and nasty tweets, they're back to it.
Anyone expecting a change in tone from any of the three major parties in the House of Commons should think again. They will, like the sheepdog and the coyote in the old Warner Bros. cartoon, pick up where they left off.
For the ruling Conservatives, that means a single-minded focus on jobs, skills development and trade - in other words, anything and everything economic, to the exclusion of much else.
One example is aboriginal poverty, which Stephen Harper's government this fall intends to try to address through the prism of jobs training.
The idea is to better prepare aboriginal workers on remote reserves for well-paying jobs on mineral or energy-extraction projects, which are set to expand dramatically across Canada.
But the government's overwhelming emphasis in the new session will be on passing the second tranche of its controversial budget bill, including measures on public-service pensions and EI.
Finalizing a European free-trade deal and furthering Canada's entry into trans-Pacific free-trade talks will run a close second.
"We will maintain a resolute focus on the economy," said a source familiar with the government's planning.
"The opposition's job is to make a sideshow and distraction and fireworks of everything. It's our job to get on with business - jobs, exports and taking steps to ensure the long-term prosperity of the country."
The opposition New Democrats, for their part, are unlikely to try to shift attention away from the economy.
Rather, they'll continue to press their core narrative that the Harper government's vision of growth, in particular resource development, is narrowly myopic, abusive of the environment and hostile to the interests of the middle class.
NDP leader Tom Mulcair has as yet shown no inclination to back away from his "Dutch disease" theme, which holds that the high Canadian dollar, driven by booming resource revenue, is harming Canadian manufacturing, to the benefit mainly of Alberta and the detriment mainly of the rest of Canada.
That ensures the critical political battleground this fall, and likely for the next three years until election 2015, will be economic, with the NDP and Conservatives vying primarily for hearts and minds in Ontario, in particular in the industrial heartland of the southwest, where most Ontarians live and where the economy still rests on automobile manufacturing.
The Conservatives and New Democrats will co-operate, to the extent that both will seek to sideline the third-place Liberals.
The Grits will seek to capitalize on their leadership race, which concludes next spring, to maintain visibility. To that end, look for a Liberal leadership candidate or candidates to emerge with a platform that is aggressively conservative economically and just as aggressively progressive on social issues.
All eyes now are on MPs Justin Trudeau and Marc Garneau, who are expected to run.
Quebec, aside from the usual irritants stemming from having a Parti Québécois government in Quebec City, is not expected to dominate the national discussion, at least not while the minority government of Pauline Marois remains in place.
The Harper government will seek to engage Quebec on questions of economics and jobs. It will ignore hotbutton issues such as language and the division of powers, wherever possible.
"People are tired of those old battles," said a senior government source. "If the government of Quebec wants to waste time picking old fights or starting new fights, they won't find a taker here."
The risk to national unity is that by benign or less-benign neglect, the Conservatives inflame Quebec public opinion to the point where Marois can win a majority, or conversely that she offers government so competent that Quebecers decide to give her one despite their distaste for more sovereignty wrangling.
But these are not immediate threats.
In the immediate future, the PM is expected to give a major foreign policy address later this month when he travels to accept the Appeal of Conscience Foundation's "world statesman" award.
