Imagine waking up one spring day and seeing a “SOLD” sign on your lawn. Your spouse didn’t put it there. You call the real-estate agent listed on the sign. She tells you you’re no longer the owner of your house. Title has been transferred. Your home has been sold.

It could happen.

Seyed Rabi and his wife, Shohreh Shafeie, bought their Toronto condo in 2001. They paid off their mortgage in three years. That’s when identity thieves moved in.

The thieves posed as the unsuspecting couple. They used fake documents to “prove” to the bank that they’d sold the property.

Then they sent in a phony buyer who transferred title to his name and then mortgaged their condo to the hilt.

The fake buyer and sellers disappeared. So did the very real, hard cash.
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Being a politician is like being a contestant on a game show. Winning and losing doesn’t just depend on how smart you are — more often it depends on how lucky you are.

Good people sometimes lose, stupid people sometimes win. That’s the luck of the draw in game shows and democracies.

We watch game-show contestants — especially the ones who sing, dance and catwalk their way to victory — and often think there must be something wrong with someone who would put themselves through that kind of public humiliation.

Only weirdos would go on TV and expose themselves to the jokes and personal criticism they endure.

Most of us wouldn’t dream of doing it. Fewer still would want their children do it. We’re just not that weird.
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Ask a woman to run for office and she’ll say, “Why are you asking me?” Ask a man, and he’ll say, “I can’t believe it took you so long to ask.”

Those are typical responses from the people I’ve asked to run over the years. They help explain why women are so sparsely represented in politics.

The number of women MPs has hovered around 20 per cent since 1997. In the last election, it decreased.

We’re 47th in the world now — behind Rwanda, Afghanistan and Iraq.
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They will never admit it, but when the Fraser Institute issues its annual school report card, school principals everywhere grit their teeth and think of England.

The principals of the expensive private schools, who traditionally find themselves at the top, may worry they might have slipped a notch or two. The ones at the bottom, always the public schools, brace themselves for a flood of media calls. Everyone wants to know how terrible it feels to be at the bottom of the heap.

And while the top schools bask in this annual confirmation of their superiority, the teachers at the low-rated ones are forced to find ways to explain why the rankings unfairly cast the school, its teachers and students as losers.

Being at a school ranked one of the worst in B.C. isn’t exactly good for morale.
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