Once upon a time, "in the last decade of the 20th century, Alberta became a paragon of fiscal virtue."

So begins a fairy tale spun by Ken Boessenkool and Ben Eisen, Alberta's equivalents of the Brothers Grimm.

Their fantasy story was treated by journalists with respectful kid gloves and a deceptive lack of background when it was released to the mainstream media last week by the so-called "School of Public Policy" at the University of Calgary.

Veteran Conservative cabinet minister Dave Hancock had good news and bad news for Guy Smith, who was acclaimed yesterday to another two-year term as president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees.

As the minister in charge of Premier Alison Redford's unwieldy Ministry of Human Services, Hancock told the Calgary Herald Thursday the provincial government has no plans just now to privatize or download onto municipalities any of the province's many social programs and services.

Honeymoon? What honeymoon?

Alison Redford was elected leader of Alberta's governing Progressive Conservative Party in a vote announced in the wee hours of Sunday morning. She hasn't even been sworn in as premier and everyone is piling on and screeching like banshees.

Just a thought, but rank and file Albertans may want to give Redford a few days to get her transition under way in an orderly fashion, and to drop a couple of hints about what her policy plans may actually be, before we all light our hair on fire.

This Labour Day in Canada, unions and the fundamental right of working people to be represented by them face an existential threat. Elected union leaders seem for the most part not to be prepared for this reality.

As in southern Europe and the United States, the people who have in the past decade brought us bank failures, recession and declining economies are massing their not inconsiderable forces to further weaken the union movement in Canada.

If you think blatant and vicious attacks on the rights of working people and the social programs that support them are just a phenomenon that happens south of the Medicine Line, you've been smoking the peels of U.S.-grown bananas!