So long, electoral reform! Welcome back, first-past-the-post!

Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party, said yesterday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's announcement that his clear promise of electoral reform back in the 2015 federal election campaign was going over the side left her feeling "more deeply shocked and betrayed by my government today than on any day of my adult life."

Those of us who are old New Democrats, or old Tories for that matter, may not feel quite so much shock.

It is Groundhog Day, after all, and we've seen this movie before -- over and over and over. Every time we're persuaded to vote Liberal for one reason or another, as a matter of fact.

While details are still unfolding on the Quebec City mosque attack Sunday night, there is little question that the shooter was motivated by hate for Muslims.  As such, Quebec and Canadian political leaders should take a long, hard look at how their statements and actions may exacerbate such hate.

Quebec Muslims rightly see the Quebec City mosque killings as just the latest escalation in a trend of growing harassment against Canada's Muslims.  "The Muslim community in Quebec is suffering from a flood of hate attacks...and now the attacks are escalating and bringing...the death of innocent people," lamented Samer Majzoub, president of the Canadian Muslim Forum.  

Saskatchewan appears to be suffering from a serious economic malady.

Nobel Prize-winning economist and journalist Paul Krugman calls it "Austerity Fever."

Canadian economist and journalist Toby Sanger calls it Sudden Apocalyptic Deficit Syndrome (SADS).

Call it what you will, a new case has now been diagnosed in Manitoba, and conservatives here in Alberta appear to have been afflicted as well -- although, thankfully, not our social democratic NDP government.

As a result, for the time being at least, we will likely be spared the worst symptoms of this tragic condition, which Sanger noted in correspondence with your blogger is "mainly a disease of affluent older white males, in which the 'cure' is inflicted on others, and is far worse than the disease."

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.