The newly released report from Alberta’s “Fair Deal” panel is not a screed arguing for the province’s secession. But it does sound at times like it was written by a group of grumpy Albertans shaking their fists at the sky.

I have to admit, I’ve always had trouble understanding exactly what it is that Grant Hunter, Alberta’s associate minister of red-tape reduction, actually does. It would seem Hunter himself has the same problem.

Pandemic? What pandemic? Watching Alberta politics these days is like riding a time machine into the past when COVID-19 didn’t exist or into a future where it’s been conquered. Or perhaps we woke up in a parallel universe. Because Alberta politics is beginning to act as if the pandemic suddenly disappeared.

Peter Lougheed had it. So did Ralph Klein. Jason Kenney most definitely does not. It is that most precious of qualities that has defined Alberta’s successful premiers and, by its absence, damned the rest. I’m talking here about luck.

Premier Jason Kenney is fluent in both of Canada’s official languages. Yet he can’t seem to communicate with Alberta’s teachers. That became evident this week when Kenney and the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) butted heads yet again over the government’s investment arm, the Alberta Investment Management Corporation, commonly known as AIMCo. The government is forcing the teachers’ $18-billion pension fund,…