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.

It would be easy just to make fun of Ezra Levant, a self-described defender of free speech, for throwing the Raging Grannies out of his protest rally yesterday for daring to try to exercise their right to free speech.

But seeing as in addition to calls from the podium to remove people who don't support his message, there were credible reports out of Calgary yesterday of death threats levelled against a young woman reporter and someone waving a noose from a hockey stick, surely we can agree to stop calling these ugly events Levant organizes "anti-carbon tax rallies."

Perhaps it was a mistake for Alberta's rattled right-wing parties, discombobulated after the pipeline-approval success of the province’s NDP government last week, to leave it to Rebel Media to help them recover their lost momentum.

Rebel Media is the political vehicle of Ezra Levant, the former Sun Media broadcaster who now operates his own far-right video blog website and has a reputation as one of Canada's most prominent online nuisances.

He is a formidable publicist and organizer who punches well above his intellectual weight in right-wing circles, but he is seen by many Canadians as an online bully with extremist views, unsavoury tactics and a high level of tolerance for people with opinions most of us would consider … well, intolerant.

The Conservative Party of Canada has not yet figured out why it lost the election last year. To hear Conservatives talk, you sometimes wonder if they know they lost at all. It seems that many of them believe their 99 seats counts as a "moral victory." The NDP should sue for breach of copyright.

Then there's the widespread view among people within the party that the problem was their "tone." It's not at all clear what they think they mean by this, but it seems to have little to do with a series of mean and bigoted policies that failed to appeal to any but the Conservative base.