Don't bet the farm on a "merger" between the Progressive Conservatives and the Alberta Party as suggested in a rather peculiar recent story in Calgary's free Metro newspaper.

Metro reported late last week that a merger between the once governing PCs and the still irrelevant Alberta Party is "percolating." Alas, what their reporter was smelling probably wasn't coffee, exactly.

Still, the report is interesting, because a trial balloon was obviously being floated by someone for some reason.

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Last night's clear victory by Progressive Conservative candidate Prabhdeep Gill in the Calgary-Greenway byelection may not completely eliminate the possibility of a merger of Alberta's two major conservative parties, but it certainly means it is unlikely to occur on the terms desired by Wildrose Leader Brian Jean.

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It's a mystery why the Alberta Party would choose not to run a candidate in the March 22 byelection in the Calgary-Greenway riding.

"Running in this byelection is not the best use of our resources as we build towards 2019," Greg Clark, the Alberta Party's leader and sole MLA, said in a news release yesterday.

If serious document destruction has actually been taking place in Alberta, chances are good it happened well before Albertans marked their ballots, let alone before their votes were counted.

For one thing, if the outgoing Progressive Conservative government led by Jim Prentice had access to quality public opinion polling -- as it most certainly did -- it would have been pretty obvious to it a few days before May 5 what was going to transpire on that day, and that the likely beneficiary would be Rachel Notley's New Democratic Party.

For another, nowadays documents are not destroyed with paper shredders as effectively as with their digital equivalents -- giant horseshoe magnets or something.