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.

Back in the summer of 2011, as Ed Stelmach's reign as premier of Alberta ground toward its inevitable terminal moment, then-employment-minister Thomas Lukaszuk sent around a letter advising stakeholders he was about to commence a review of the Alberta Labour Code.

It had to be done, said the minister responsible for the province's labour portfolio, "to ensure we remain competitive over the longer term."

Major players in Alberta's labour movement found this development disquieting, not because the Code doesn't need revising, but because no one in labour had any idea how such a thought had come to enter the minister's normally relatively empty headspace.

All in all, I guess, you could make a good case this was a pretty lousy budget.

It's deeply confusing, as without any doubt the Alberta government intended, and there are a couple of real disasters lurking in its pages -- got kids in post-secondary education, anyone?

But in the aftermath of the Alberta Budget Speech read yesterday afternoon by Progressive Conservative Finance Minister Doug Horner, who was wearing his new flip-flops at the time, you have to admit it was a pretty slick example of expectation management.

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!