Well, no one can say that Ric McIver hasn't set himself apart from the other two candidates for the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party leadership.

While frontrunner Jim Prentice and tail gunner Thomas Lukaszuk have each offered five largely meaningless anodyne platitudes as their priorities, McIver has been right out there with some fairly definitive ideas.

Not good ideas, mind you. And they'd be bound to be highly controversial if anyone except me thought he had any chance of winning. So if I'm right, and everyone else is wrong, this could end up making a lot of people very unhappy.

Judging from what they read and hear in the news, Canadians can be forgiven for concluding a large number of organizations representing a broad range of opinions are lobbying public-spiritedly for more access to Temporary Foreign Workers by Canadian businesses.

But while many individual business owners would no doubt love to have a direct pipeline to the huge international pool of compliant, vulnerable and easy-to-exploit foreign workers instead of yielding to market pressure to pay Canadians a living wage, the seeming multitude of public voices calling for more access to TFWs originates mainly with a small group of individuals and well-financed interlocking organizations.

How could the handoff of a $90,000 cheque to Senator Mike Duffy by the prime minister's chief of staff not be worthy of prosecution while the acceptance of the same piece of paper by the senator is?

Wherever the trial of Duffy leads us in the months and years to come, this is the question ordinary Canadians are scratching their heads about today as they pick up a whiff of something not quite as it should be on the breeze from Ottawa -- like the ephemeral scent of a distant skunk's perfume on a summer's night.

CALGARY

Could Ric McIver actually win the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race?

Or, to put that another way, could Jim Prentice lose?

Maybe that seems like a theme for a political science fiction story to you. After all, Mr. Prentice -- the former banker, corporate lobbyist and federal cabinet minister -- is the choice of the PC establishment.

What's more, he's now backed by 49 of 59 PC Members of the Legislative Assembly. All the political oddsmakers say he’s a sure bet to win. He acts like a guy who's on a holiday cruise to victory.