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.

We know that being in power for more than four decades makes you lazy. Who knew 41 years in power would make you stupid too?

How else can we explain this strange, listless, disengaged Progressive Conservative campaign? How else to account for the foolish choices that preceded it?

The strategic brain trust now running Premier Alison Redford's Conservative party lit a fire and stood back while the whole rickety Tory edifice began to burn to the ground.

As Ken Kowalski, the venerable and soon-to-retire Speaker of the Alberta Legislative Assembly might have put it: "Well! That didn't take long!"

No sooner had the mainstream media proclaimed the Progressive Conservatives under Premier Alison Redford on their way to yet another huge victory than the word was all over the Interwebs that the Tories themselves were returning to their traditionally prickly ways.

A wise old Alberta political hand told me many years ago that this province's Conservatives don't really like being challenged by anyone, and even being so bold as to chat with an MLA from an Opposition party in public can be enough to get you and your cause into hot water.

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.

As Alberta Speaker Ken Kowalski might say after a particularly spirited rendition of the national anthem by occupants of the legislative galleries, "Well, now!"

The Internet is abuzz with predictions that Kowalski, after three decades and two years as a Conservative MLA, nine consecutive terms in all, is about to retire from politics.

It's been said here that the biggest problem Danielle Smith's Wildrose Alliance would ever have is the kind of candidates the right-wing party attracts.

Smith, after all, is a pretty smooth politician who intends to insinuate her market fundamentalist nostrums into the Alberta sensibility rather as Prime Minister Stephen Harper is trying hard these days to keep his worse instincts under control and take an incremental approach to moving Canada far to the right.

Nothing terrifies a Canadian provincial politician more than a fight over Roman Catholic education, and with good reason. It's a political time bomb with a sizzling fuse. It's an issue on which it is simply impossible to reach a compromise that will make all voters happy, and one that is sure to enrage large groups of electors.

Supporters of publicly financed Catholic education are well organized and determined to defend their rights, which have roots deep in Canada's constitutional history. Supporters of secular public education can be aggressive too, although they're usually happy enough if there are adequately funded schools for their children as well.