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.

The foundations of the regional planning crisis that prompted a frustrated Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths to threaten Edmonton-area municipalities with forced amalgamation were laid by the destructive policies announced by premier Ralph Klein's sidekick Steve West back in 1993.

On Oct. 7 of that year, West, the Vermilion veterinarian and MLA who acted in a variety of portfolios as Klein's minister of dismantling public services, marched to the front of a meeting of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association and proclaimed that the government would be pulling the plug on the province's internationally respected system of regional planning.

The scene: Just before Christmas 2001 at the Legislative Press Gallery's Holiday "Gala," a conversation takes place amidst of a swirl of intoxicated journalists, politicians, public relations flacks, lobbyists and other political hangers on.

The cast: Ralph Klein, premier of Alberta, clearly feeling no pain; your blogger, only on his second beer, then the PR guy for the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, the provincial civil service workers' union; and Peter Elzinga, Klein's chief of staff.

OK, Alberta Education Minister Jeff Johnson’s bizarre attempt to bluff the province’s 35,000 unionized schoolteachers into signing a contract has failed. Now what?

One week ago, Johnson mailed the president of the Alberta Teachers Association and the Chair of the Alberta School Boards Association a rambling letter setting out the government's latest bargaining demands in what's turned out to be a rocky round of negotiations with the province's teachers.