Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne began the day yesterday explaining why he may not be able to prevent Alberta Health Services' 99 top managers from getting their controversial bonuses -- you know, the ones he fired the 10 members of the AHS board over on Wednesday.

As Stephen Duckett, once the CEO of Alberta Health Services, might have said to Stephen Lockwood, who until yesterday morning was the chair of the AHS Board: "Well, that's the way the cookie crumbles."

Duckett and Lockwood both met sudden ends as senior officials of the Alberta health care system when Alberta’s often-arbitrary Progressive Conservative government began to view them as more of an impediment than an aide to its plans.

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S'cuse me! We ex-journalists are permitted to do whatever we like! And if Prime Minister Thomas Mulcair wants to appoint me to the Senate, I'm taking the job!

The same thing goes for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau if he makes the offer, if you must know.

But then, I haven't worked as a journalist in this century and, with a little luck and the intervention of a kindly and progressive prime minister, I'll never have to consider such a fate again.

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TORONTO -- From Rob Ford to Brent Rathgeber in a single day -- talk about going from the sublime to the ridiculous! Or is that the other way around?

I confess that I was gobsmacked by the revelation yesterday Brent Rathgeber, the Conservative Member of Parliament for the Alberta community where I live, has pulled the plug on membership in the Harper Conservatives because of his erstwhile party's determined commitment to opacity in government.