This compliment may come out sounding a little more backhanded than intended, but the Alberta Legislature could have done a lot worse than choose someone like Gene Zwozdesky to wear the Speaker’s three-cornered hat, as its MLAs did yesterday.

This concludes the principal business of this otherwise silly six-day legislative session: naming a replacement for former speaker Ken Kowalski, who is no longer a member of the House and whose influence, rest assured Premier Alison Redford long ago concluded, needed to end forthwith.

It’s great work if you can find it!

The first session of the 28th Legislature of Alberta opens tomorrow and will sit for … hold onto your hats, people … all of six days.

In their defence, sort of, that's about all Premier Alison Redford and the rest of the Legislature's 87 MLAs are going to need anyway, because they only plan to deal with one piece of legislation, something called, appropriately enough, Bill 1.

Bill 1 is … well, actually, Bill 1 is a secret. You'll find out what it’s about tomorrow at the same time as the rest of us.

JASPER, Alberta

Just when you thought it was safe to go out of the house again, there's another election!

But you don’t get to vote in this one, even though it’s pretty important to Alberta just the same.

Next on the agenda for the Alberta Legislature: the 87 newly elected MLAs need to elect a Speaker to preside over their … er … deliberations.

Sounds routine, but in a funny inside-baseball way, the Speaker's job is almost as important as the premier's. The Speaker, after all, is the person who gets to set the tone of debate in the Legislature and can go a long way to make it civilized, or hyper-partisan.

Civilization as we know it in Alberta has ended.

Ken Kowalski, 66, is stepping down. The Speaker of the Alberta Legislature and its longest-serving MLA -- "the dean of the Legislature," in Press Gallery-speak -- made the announcement yesterday morning in a news release that looked as if he'd typed it up himself late at night on his home computer.

Former Alberta energy minister Ron Liepert, who is now Premier Alison Redford's minister of finance, yesterday denied Opposition allegations that his previous department put together a backroom deal to benefit a couple of energy companies.