As Albertans head to the polls today with large numbers of voters obviously in a mood for change and the media telling us a Wildrose majority is unstoppable, Progressive Conservative Premier Alison Redford may have only one good card left.

If her hole card turns out to be an ace, it'll be because of the caution of the significant number of Albertans and their families who work for and with this government, its agencies and the many groups and businesses that depend on it to survive.

A political party can score points by gratuitously attacking such people -- as the Wildrose attack on "big government" without question has through this campaign, notwithstanding the party's too-cute claim to recognize the value of "front-line" government employees.

As the beloved Scottish poet Rabbie Burns so famously observed, "the best-laid plans o' mice an' men gang aft agley."

The best-laid plans o' mice, of course, are usually wrecked by people with traps. But those of men often go awry because of what might be termed an over-exuberance of democracy.

Consider the sad case of Alberta's newest unemployed person, Ken Hughes, who on Dec. 28 last year announced he was stepping down as the first and only chair of Alberta's giant public health-care board, known nowadays as Alberta Health Services.

Well, of course he's running for office.

With a record like his, how could he not?

I refer, of course, to Ken Hughes, the first and so far the only chair of Alberta Health Services, the massive province-wide health board created in May 2008 to … well, it's never really been all that clear just what AHS was supposed to do.

AHS has managed, one supposes, to realize a few economies of scale -- especially among traditionally overpaid top health region executive positions -- but at the cost of some pretty fantastic dis-economies of scale.

Does anybody remember the brouhaha in 2009 that was semi-officially designated The Trouble in Strathmore?

The trouble actually started a year earlier, in February 2008, when then premier Ed Stelmach and his Progressive Conservatives were running for election. The premier got up on his hind legs at a campaign meeting in the town half an hour east of Calgary and promised residents the government of Alberta would build 600 long-term care beds, 100 of them right there in Strathmore. There were 23 long-term care beds in the town at the time.

"We don't need any more meetings," Stelmach vowed. "It is a go."

If Stelmach had kept that election promise, he might still be premier today.

How do Stephen Duckett, Alberta Health Services and the government of Alberta get to have it both ways at once?

The former CEO of Alberta Health Services, the province-wide health agency Duckett led, and Alberta's Conservative government all agree that the Australian PhD economist was not fired when he left AHS in November 2011.

At the same time, these three mismatched amigos all happily agree that Duckett has been paid out his entire year's salary, benefits, variable pay and an amount to cover contingent liabilities -- which together add up to the not insignificant sum of $735,630.

Most of us who spend a lifetime toiling in wage slavery figure you can have it one way, or you can have it the other.

This just in: Stephen Duckett wasn't fired for the Notorious Cookie Incident™. It was just, you know … irreconcilable differences?

Well, it's true, I guess. The former president and CEO of the Alberta Health Services bureaucratic behemoth wasn't really fired for his Monty Python moment with a cookie on Nov. 19, 2010. The famously undiplomatic Australian PhD health care economist was fired for becoming a lightning rod for voter dissatisfaction with the Alberta government's epic mishandling of the health care file throughout 2009 and 2010.

Where's Stephen Duckett when you need him?

Don't you think the crusty Australian, who was the president and CEO of the Alberta Health Services hospital-bureaucracy behemoth before an oatmeal-raisin cookie got the better of him, would have snapped off exactly the right response to yesterday's outrage-of-the-day story about how calls to the AHS Health Link line were being put through to a sex chat service instead?