I have always been one to speak ill of the dead.

That is, if the dead have it coming.

I have never understood why, when a person makes the transition from breathing to not breathing, all of a sudden the rest of us are expected to pretend they’re Mother Theresa.

Here is, best as I recollect, a phone conversation I had with somebody many years ago.

Caller: Did you hear Darryl died? Drunk driving. Hit a semi head on.

Me: Good.

Caller: What? How can you say that?

Me: He was awful. He was a vicious bully when he was a kid. He still stars in some of my more lurid nightmares. The only reason he stopped beating up guys is that the rest of us hit a growth spurt and he stayed short. And that’s when he switched to beating up his girlfriends. He was a sociopath. The world’s a better place without him.

Caller: I still can’t believe you said that, man.

Me: Am I wrong?

Caller: No … but he’s dead!

Regular readers know where this is going.

Let us speak ill of Alberta’s Tories. Let us dance upon their grave.

Late last week, they held their annual leader’s dinner fundraiser.

Jim Prentice, who led the herd of corrupt lemmings off the cliff, was his usual self. Self-justifying, oblivious and arrogant. He still doesn’t get it.

Laugh line of the evening for me was not new leader Ric McIver’s feeble joke when he called his caucus to the stage, telling the audience not to worry because it wouldn’t take long to get them all up there. It was Prentice when he said: “The purpose of the election was to equip Alberta’s government with the moral authority to do what needs to be done.”

An Alberta Tory. Talking like he knows what moral authority looks like. In public. Without blushing.

Helpful hint: Morality would have been adhering to the fixed election-date legislation your own party passed to take crass opportunism out of the political equation. Morality is when you’re sticking it to Albertans to finance a bad budget, you also stick it to your corporate buddies.

McIver, who didn’t seem to realize he’s a dead man talking, tried to lay the groundwork for recovery.

He did the usual bob and weave well known to anyone who owns a copy of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Playbook. Demonize previous leader. Hope Albertans buy it.

He said: “Albertans were determined to send us a message in this election. In response, I say, ‘Message received.’ ”

Good Lord, man. We didn’t send you a message. That implies we believe your party has a capacity for honest self-reflection and change.

We do not. That’s why we reduced you to third-party irrelevance.

That’s why when the shredders started working overtime the minute you guys lost the election, so many of us assumed you were destroying evidence.

Rightly or wrongly, a lot of Albertans think the PCs are dirty. It’s not just about pretending to be humble.

It’s about convincing us you’re not crooked. That you were not part of a complex web of special interests all gathered for one purpose and one purpose alone — to feast upon the taxpayer.

And what did Ric McIver do as it became clear Albertans thought party apparatchiks were shredding damaging secrets?

Did he lunge for the nearest microphone to proclaim: “I have called a halt to document destruction in my own office and I urge all my colleagues to do the same, so that the ethics commissioner can properly oversee the process so we can assure Albertans that they can place their trust in us in years to come?”

He did not.

When finally cornered by reporters, he said there was a policy. “If the instructions were followed, then there shouldn’t be a problem.”

Well. As long as there’s a policy. Cause nobody ever goes against policy now, do they?

McIver said Albertans should be comforted by the fact that two Alberta agencies, alerted by whistleblowers, were investigating the matter.

Mr. McIver? We are not comforted. But you know what is comforting?

The fact you guys aren’t running the show anymore.