Once upon a time, while Alberta's premier was telling fairy tales to impressionable children, some of her senior officials were spinning fairy stories of their own.

Actually, this all happened yesterday.

The premier told a group of Grade 1 students at an Edmonton school library a story about a good princess named Alison, who built schools for children just like them, and a very bad princess named Danielle, who wouldn't build any schools at all!

The Alison in question, of course, is Premier Alison Redford herself, the one telling the story. The Danielle is Danielle Smith, leader of the Opposition Wildrose Party. And maybe Redford didn't use exactly those words, but you get the general idea.

Here it is 2013, the Earth is about to become an urban planet, and the Progressive Conservative Government of Alberta and the Opposition Wildrose Party are locked in a titanic battle to win the hearts and minds of conservative rural voters.

What's wrong with this picture?

City folks? As far as both parties are concerned, we're just effete, latte-swilling, soft-handed condo dwellers who get along by mooching off the hard work of our horny-handed rural betters.

It's interesting to juxtapose the results of two new polls on related but different topics that were released yesterday -- a Think HQ poll of Alberta voter intentions and an Environics poll of Albertans attitudes about taxes and public services.

The results of the former were published in the afternoon by CTV; the results of latter were released in the morning by the Alberta Federation of Labour, for which the survey was done.

Do you remember that promise by the Alberta government to build 3,000 seniors' beds? It turns out they only planned to rent them!

The problem with renting beds from private companies, of course, is the same as with any form of privatized medicare: it ends up costing a heck of a lot more than we were promised, and delivering much less. 

It also turns out the Alberta government's bad bargain with private care operators means the fragile seniors who end up occupying the beds are subject to eviction!