Alberta’s most extreme right-wingers are not just talking these days as if it's only a matter of ticking the weeks off their calendars until they automatically defeat Premier Rachel Notley and the province's NDP government, but as if the same thing is bound to happen soon in Ottawa as well.

Soon enough, they seem to reckon, prime minister Kellie Leitch, Chris Alexander or Brad Trost will be Making Canada Great Again.

The reward of being a congenital pessimist is that one is rarely disappointed. Bad news is always around the next corner, just wait. But at least anticipating the worst often softens the blow when the worst arrives, as it so often does.

Attentive readers of this space may recall that in column after lugubrious column, I kept warning that Donald Trump could still pull it off. This was long after most pundits and pollsters were complacently counting him out. How desperately I wish I'd been wrong.

Jason Kenney is the Hillary Clinton of Alberta politics!

Before you all start screaming, or convulsing with laughter, let me explain.

I do not mean that Kenney, the front-running social conservative candidate to lead the Progressive Conservative Party and thereafter unite Alberta's right, precisely shares the views of Clinton, the unsuccessful Democratic Party candidate in last week's U.S. presidential election. Just the same, despite big differences on issues like climate change and women's rights, their neoliberal economic positions place them closer together than might be immediately apparent.