To read the “Fair Deal” panel’s report is to gaze into a crystal ball. This is your future, Alberta. It’s a future where we’ll be picking fights with the federal government, pitting Alberta against Canada, embroiling Albertans in never-ending debates over equalization, launching expensive and meaningless referendums and blaming others for all our problems. Come to think of it, this…

“Oil is dead,” says Elizabeth May. No, oil is not dead. But it does have an expiry date. Even Stephen Harper acknowledged that when, as prime minister in 2015, he joined other Group of Seven leaders in a pledge to stop burning fossil fuels by the end of the century.

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.

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.

For Alberta premiers it is the pilgrimage: The business trip to the United States. Premiers have been doing it for the past 50 years, all with cap-in-hand and all pretty much singing the same slogan: “Alberta is open for business.” Now it’s Jason Kenney’s turn. This week he travelled to New York where he spoke with business reporters, made a speech to…