Labour Day will soon be upon us, and Alberta's labour minister has been publicly musing about measures that Alberta might take to weaken unions further and cripple what's left of the rights of the province's working people.

That, of course, is pretty much par for the course out here in the New West, where labour rights taken for granted in most of the rest of Canada are basically a cruel fraud. It's the back-story that's more interesting.

The labour minister is a fellow named Thomas Lukaszuk, who in Alberta officially goes by the Orwellian title Minister of Employment and Immigration.