Once upon a time, "in the last decade of the 20th century, Alberta became a paragon of fiscal virtue."

So begins a fairy tale spun by Ken Boessenkool and Ben Eisen, Alberta's equivalents of the Brothers Grimm.

Their fantasy story was treated by journalists with respectful kid gloves and a deceptive lack of background when it was released to the mainstream media last week by the so-called "School of Public Policy" at the University of Calgary.

Well, that's one strategy for establishing your polling credibility: If you come up with a poll that other pollsters, bloggers and the usual complainers dismiss as an outlier, do another one that says the same thing.

That's what Forum Research Inc. of Toronto did yesterday, publishing a poll of Alberta voters' intentions that shows the Alberta Progressive Conservatives under Premier Alison Redford unchanged from its survey last month at 38 per cent committed support.

Toronto's National Post -- or, as I prefer to think of it, the National Pest -- states in its meta tags that it's "Canada's trusted source for national news, financial news, world news, blogging, twitter, tweets, opinion, vodcast, podcast, commentary, entertainment and sports." Really, it does!

Nothing in there about polls, though, so we're not going to get to report them to the Better Business Bureau, tonight anyway.

Since gaining a majority government, the Conservative Party of Canada has waged a rather reckless fight on Canada's democracy. At the UN vote on Palestinian statehood, Harper's delegation made Canada a pariah by promising to vote against Palestine -- along with only five other countries and against the wishes of the majority of Canadians. At the COP 17 global climate conference, Minister Peter Kent further shamed Canada on the issue of climate change.

I wish I had my (virtual) hands on an original copy of

I'm just asking

All across Canada yesterday afternoon, journalists were filing cheerful little stories about the latest results from the Newspaper Audience Databank and how they provide heartening news for the local rag and, indeed, the entire newspaper industry.

After NADBank yesterday privately released its 2009-2010 readership results to the newspapers in the communities surveyed, the resulting story in the Edmonton Journal was headlined "Readership numbers good news for The Journal."