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.

Merry Christmas! Vladimir Putin has not yet hacked Christmas in Alberta, although he probably could, so there are political presents under the Yule tree for everyone, regardless of whether their orientation is to the right or to the left.

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.

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.