Even word that Tom Flanagan, the Icarus of Canada's neoconservative movement, had flown too close to the sun and was coming down to earth in flames was not enough to save Alberta's crisis-prone Progressive Conservative government from more pain!

One would have thought Premier Alison Redford would have been cheered when the principal architect of the Opposition Wildrose Party's brush with victory last April appeared at a seminar to defend users of child pornography and thereby assured his own political and professional demise.

After all, he was very nearly the cause of her party's destruction.

Every day, it just gets weirder and weirder.

The day before yesterday, we're told, Alberta Premier Alison Redford waded into her health minister's already strangely muddled negotiations with the province's physicians to state that the only way the docs will get a raise is if the province goes back to charging health care premiums.

What's more, she said in an impromptu news conference in Calgary, there's no way that's ever going to happen.

And what's even more, she went on, there's also no way they're going to get a raise either. Period.

Is the increasingly bitter fight between Alberta's government and the province's physicians just about money? It's said here it’s more about who gets to control the health care system.

If you need evidence for this assertion, look no further than the fact just two and a half months ago Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne said he was going to impose a pay deal on the docs that would have seen their salaries keep on rising.

Premier Alison Redford is now traipsing around the province explaining that these same doctors are being paid too much -- why, they get 20 to 29 per cent more than their counterparts anywhere else in Canada!

On Monday, Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne announced a year-long project to study seniors' residential centres and figure out the best way to fund and run them.

Sounds good, lots of Albertans must have concluded, before getting on with their business confident the administration of seniors' care under Premier Alison Redford is in good hands.