Prime Minister Stephen Harper was apparently grinding away at his Conservative caucus yesterday morning about the need for Senate reform.

An interesting strategy, his!

First you pack the place with self-entitled cheats and porkchoppers like Mike "The Puffster" Duffy, then you argue that their misdeeds are proof the institution needs reform!

If nothing else, this suggests Calgary Centre MP Joan Crockatt was sticking right to the party strategy handbook when she suggested in a now-notorious Tweet that her Conservative Party is more ethical than all those other parties because some of its unethical senators resigned from caucus when they got caught.

Schadenfreude is all very well, but this whole Rob Ford video scandal has me feeling just the tiniest bit hinky.

It's a due-process thing, and I recognize that there can be no due process in politics, as unjust as that may seem.

No one can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory quite like the New Democrats in my native British Columbia.

Still, while Tuesday's upset B.C. election victory by Premier Christy Clark and her un-liberal Liberals is inevitably going to be, well, upsetting to a lot of New Democrats, it is not really bad news for Thomas Mulcair and the federal NDP.

This, we might say, is the social democratic truth that dare not speak its name: an NDP government in a large province like British Columbia would inevitably have enacted policies that upset voters elsewhere in Canada and would have provided excellent targets for attacks by the ever-negative Stephen Harper Tories on Mulcair and the NDP.

In Alberta, it appears you now have more power as the president of a neighbourhood community league than as a duly elected member of a school board!

With province-wide municipal elections scheduled to take place in October, that's something would-be candidates for school trustee might want to think about.

Albertans had a small but significant demonstration of this axiom yesterday, when Education Minister Jeff Johnson announced that if members of elected school boards won't co-operate with the government and vote the way they have been instructed, the results of their mistaken votes will be made to reflect the decision they were supposed to make.