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.

For the moment at least, with Stephen Duckett gone over the side, the acting CEO of Alberta Health Services is Dr. Chris Eagle.

Until yesterday, Eagle was the AHS Executive Vice-President of Quality and Service Improvement, with, according to his official on-line biography, responsibility for overseeing the operations of the larger academic hospitals, the central health service delivery zone, infection prevention and control, patient experience and ensuring quality and service improvement throughout the organization.

The Wildrose Alliance is the party of untrammeled free enterprise, right? Dog eats dog. Big shark swallows little shark. Government has "no business picking winners and losers." (How many times have we heard that one, eh?) It’s just better that way, they promise…

So what was Wildrose Alliance Leader Danielle Smith doing yesterday demanding that the Alberta government pick winners and losers?

As long ago as the Ralph Klein regime, cynical conservative politicians from Alberta who wanted to privatize our public health care system have talked up the notion that private corporations do a bang-up job delivering "publicly funded" health care.

Indeed, when the "publicly funded" mantra starts coming out of the mouth of an Alberta politician nowadays it's a certain sign a pro-privatization pitch is next on the agenda. In the Albertan context at least, the phrase has come to be code for "provided for a profit."