"Faced with the end of their party, PCs ponder kicking out Jason Kenney," the Calgary Herald blared yesterday.

The author of this scoop -- and if his story is right, it's undeniably a major scoop -- is Don Braid, the Herald's political columnist for many years.

Braid's claim in a nutshell is that now with it looking increasingly as if Kenney will win the race to lead the Alberta Tories with relative ease -- thanks to what the columnist called "his organization, money and bloodthirsty will to prevail" -- Tory insiders on the party's board may give him the bum's rush for planning to destroy the party.

Understanding history requires a long view, and the picture that is emerging from the Reform Party upheaval, which began with that party's formation by Preston Manning almost 30 years ago, is of a movement that has failed in its fundamental goals of eliminating the Liberal Party of Canada and replacing it with a U.S.-style two-party system that would push Canadian political discourse ever further to the right.

Manning founded the Reform Party in the fall of 1987, and it has been with us ever since -- although it was later known as the Canadian Alliance and, after its reverse hostile takeover of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in 2003, as the Conservative Party of Canada.

It was so busy in political Alberta yesterday, those folks who were inclined to do so barely had time to celebrate the first anniversary of the defeat of the Harper government by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberals in the 2015 federal election!

NDP Premier Rachel Notley gave her "state of the province” speech to a friendly, invited crowd in the lobby of the Jack Singer Concert Hall in Calgary, where she told Albertans that notwithstanding hard times, her government isn't about to cut health care or education funding. But spending in other areas, it was pretty clear, will be constrained -- just how constrained remains to be seen.

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It sure doesn't look as if the pipeline safety concerns of Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre were all that unreasonable now that we've learned about what a lousy job the National Energy Board was doing to ensure the safety of pipelines during the decade of Harperism, does it?