Happy New Year!

This New Year we're going to keep it simple and start off 2017 with Alberta Diary's Top 10 political predictions for the year ahead of us. Here they are:

1. Thanks to whomever replaces him -- Charlie Angus, c'mon down! -- Thomas Mulcair will start to look pretty good as federal NDP leader. It'll be too late, of course.

2. Jason Kenney will win the leadership of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party on the first ballot in Calgary on March 18. The PC Party is not doomed, however, despite Kenney's plan to dismantle it and merge it with the Wildrose Opposition, because many Wildrosers will be unconvinced by his rhetoric and that of his backers that resistance is futile.

There's more evidence out of British Columbia this week that Rachel Notley's social licence approach to pipeline development continues to work -- this time on the province's New Democrats, who up to now have been taking a hard line against the idea of more pipelines from Alberta.

This is speculative, of course, but if it turns out to be true, you can expect Alberta's political right, increasingly dominated by hysterics, to react with fury, not a more appropriate emotion such as, say, gratitude.

I simply couldn't believe Gary Mason in Friday's Globe and Mail article entitled "Sorry Vancouver: The rest of Canada needs pipelines". I urge you to read the article so that if I misrepresent Mr. Mason you will see it for yourself.

British Columbia's carbon tax is once again being lauded on the international stage. On November 16 in Marrakech, Morocco, the government of B.C. received the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change's Momentum for Change award for its revenue-neutral tax.

As a climate policy that saw carbon pollution decline while the province's economy grew, the carbon tax deserves the plaudits. Until it was frozen in 2012, the carbon tax served as an effective example of carbon pricing, and it remains a model that can and should be replicated across Canada and internationally.