As 2017 begins, we still await the details of Wildrose Party Leader Brian Jean's alternative plan to unite the right.

All we're supposed to know is that it presumably involves him, and not Jason Kenney or some other nominal Progressive Conservative, leading the charge against the NDP government of Premier Rachel Notley in the next provincial general election.

The Wildrose Party is still cooking up their launch strategy, and their only comment is that they won't yet comment. Naturally, idle hands being the Devil's workshop, this leads to idle speculation on the part of bloggers.

Today is the 80th anniversary of the sweeping election of Social Credit in Alberta.

No one can say it wasn't the start of an era!

It's hard to imagine now how big a deal this election victory was in 1935 – but then, it’s not been since the 1930s that Alberta or anywhere else in Canada has experienced times quite as desperate as the Great Depression.

Last weekend, the priests and priestesses of the Canadian branch of the international market fundamentalist religion gathered in Ottawa and called, as they always do, for more human sacrifice.

I speak, of course, of the annual networking conference of the inaptly labelled Manning Centre for Building Democracy, named for Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party that now governs in Ottawa and Canadian pontifex maximus of the cult of market fundamentalism.

Assuming at least some of the ideas put forward at Saturday's Alberta Economic Summit in Calgary actually represent the Redford Government's policy plans and preferences, it was extremely interesting to hear investment banker George Gosbee call for privatization of ATB Financial.

The sale of the former Alberta Treasury Branches financial institution created by premier William Aberhart as a Social Credit remedy to the darkest days of the Depression would net about $4 billion for the government, Gosbee noted.