With last week's announcement that the Liberals are abandoning their promise of electoral reform, coupled with their out-of-control deficit spending, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may have already burned the bridges he built, both to the left and to the right, that won him a majority government in 2015.  

The Liberals cannot win a majority in 2019 without the support they siphoned from the Greens and the NDP on the left, nor without the soft conservatives and Red Tories who turned to them after a decade of Stephen Harper. After all, as much as we view Trudeau's 2015 majority as a resounding victory, the Liberals captured less than 40 per cent of the popular vote. Subtract five per cent and all bets are off.

What's black and white and red all over? The Canadian newspaper industry's balance sheets.

But as has been said here many times before, no industry had more warning of the extent and nature of the coming digital revolution than the Canadian newspaper industry, and it has turned the wrong direction at every step along the way to its current disastrous destination.

But that doesn't mean these newspapers' well-heeled owners won't demand tax-supported subsidies to support their badly run businesses if they're given any encouragement -- which is exactly what the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to have been doing.

Albert Einstein's purported definition of insanity -- doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result -- has become a political cliché: Consider Jason Kenney, a man who believes so fervently in a failed strategy for developing Alberta's resources that he bitterly rejects all other approaches as heresy -- especially ones that work!

Kenney is like the guy who says the earth is flat, but always has an instant scientific explanation for why that ship just sailed over the horizon.

This would be amusing were Kenney not the front-running candidate to lead Alberta's conservatives (and therefore, unfortunately, quite possibly the rest of us as well) to market-fundamentalist nirvana. He is, so it matters.

Jason Kenney's Tweet of congratulations to former Liberal Party of Canada leader Michael Ignatieff on Friday was a rare moment of graciousness amid the usual stream of splenetic social media outbursts Albertans have come to associate with the candidate to lead Alberta's Progressive Conservative Party.

"Congratulations to @M_Ignatieff and all others receiving the Order of Canada today," former prime minister Stephen Harper's top lieutenant piously proclaimed in the Tweet. "A much-deserved recognition of a brilliant Canadian." (Emphasis added.)