'Tis late and the CBC's pancake makeup weighs heavy on your blogger's face. As all the world must surely know by now, Alberta Premier Alison Redford's hole card turned out to be an ace yesterday and Alberta's 41-year Progressive Conservative dynasty will live a little longer, perhaps a lot longer.

So today there is no joy in Mudville -- whether that place is located in the town of Okotoks, site of the world's largest glacial erratic, or at 24 Sussex Drive -- for the Mighty Flanagan has struck out. You can almost hear the disgruntled Wildrosers chanting "45 years is enough!"

If you have any doubts left there are only four more sleeps before the end of the Progressive Conservative Era in Alberta, look no further than the video and website called "I never thought I'd vote PC."

Whether or not the PCs under Alison Redford had anything to do with this vain effort to encourage hip, edgy young people to vote for the clapped out Conservative party in a last-ditch effort to prevent a Wildrose Apocalypse, there could be no surer sign of the imminent demise of the once mighty Tory dynasty.

According to the latest poll, Alberta’s election race has tightened significantly, and the province’s One True Conservative Party is now in a statistical tie with the province’s Other One True Conservative Party.

Actually, never mind the “statistical” bit. According to the on-line poll of 902 voters taken over the weekend by Leger Marketing and published this morning in the Postmedia newspapers, the difference in support for the far-right Wildrose Party under Danielle Smith and the not-quite-so-far-right Progressive Conservative Party under Premier Alison Redford is pretty much an honest-to-god dead heat.

When Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman crashed the premier's "photo opportunity" early this afternoon, it got me thinking how the Conservatives aren't the only Alberta political party that needs their old leader back. I mean, really, where's Kevin Taft now that the Liberals need him?

Planning his retirement, presumably, without having to worry about Ms. Redford's panicky decision this morning to suspend "from this day forward" the retirement payments to departing MLAs.

Forum Research Inc. of Toronto was back in the field yesterday doing another Friday night poll of Alberta voter intentions.

The questions asked by the poll, the weird way it asked them and their timing may all provide some insights into why Forum's surveys have consistently produced better results for the Wildrose Party than other public opinion polls by other pollsters.

Another squalid American-style push poll, which has all the hallmarks of a Wildrose Party operation, had telephones dingling in Alberta yesterday evening.

Meanwhile, yet another legitimate poll, this one released Thursday by Return on Insight, shows the Progressive Conservatives under Premier Alison Redford continue to hold a commanding lead among decided voters.

Quite possibly the results of the ROI poll and others like it explain the tactics being used in the push poll.

A push poll, as previously noted in this space, is a political campaigning technique in which a political party or interest group attempts to change the opinions of the people whom they contact by pretending to conduct a poll.

Now that the far-right Wildrose Party is poaching Alberta NDP policy, could we trust them to carry it out?

Doubtful, but you can hardly blame Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith for trying to exploit the near-universal outrage throughout Alberta at the province's shocking electricity prices.

These prices, cripplingly high now and showing no sign of abating thanks to the misconceived and hard-to-understand "deregulation" implemented by the catastrophic Ralph Klein government in the mid-1990s, nevertheless seem unable to inspire any subsequent Progressive Conservative government to do anything about them.