It was bitter medicine. And nary a drop of sugar to help it go down. Premier Jason Kenney’s address to Albertans Tuesday night was perhaps the most sombre and downright bleak speech ever delivered by an Alberta premier, certainly the darkest among the televised “fireside chats” that began with Peter Lougheed in the early 1980s.

“The province is facing a fiscal crisis because of a sudden drop in the price of oil. Isn’t this territory as familiar as the back of our hands? Oh, the causes might be new — the COVID-19 virus playing havoc with stock markets as a spat between Russia and Saudi Arabia wreaks chaos with oil prices — but the territory…

When is a “war room” not a war room? Well, when it’s the “Alberta Information Centre.” When is what looks suspiciously like an anti-union campaign not an anti-union campaign? Well, when it’s an “Employee Labour Relations Support Program.” Say hello to the season of the euphemism in Alberta politics.

Reading the sky-is-falling report from the Blue Ribbon Panel on Alberta’s Finances should give you a dreaded feeling of deja vu. The report — and the rhetoric surrounding it — sound remarkably similar to the political arguments made by then-premier Ralph Klein 25 years ago to invoke massive cuts to government spending and services. Back then Klein summed up the state…