Surely the key message of the Wildrose floor-crossing debacle is that no one can feel confident Alberta Premier Jim Prentice will keep his promises.

This potential lack of reliability should concern anyone -- be they the premier of another province, the leader of another level of government, citizens seeking to influence government policy, members of the premier’s own caucus, or rank and file voters -- who needs or wishes to do business with the Prentice Government.

One of the more irritating byproducts of mass defection by the Mudville Nine and two of their caucus colleagues who rejoined the Tory Mothership a few days earlier has been the outright wholesaling of the nonsensical claim the Wildrose Party was the most effective opposition Alberta has ever known.

Say it ain't so, Danielle?

Well, the Wildrose Party committed ritual political suicide today, defecting in even greater numbers to the Progressive Conservative caucus of Premier Jim Prentice than anticipated by the Edmonton rumour machine.

At the end of the day, not only had party leader Danielle Smith and House leader Rob Anderson abandoned their foundering Wildrose Party, so had seven other MLAs.

A chipper looking Prentice and an apparently tired Smith finally appeared at Edmonton's Government House just after 4 p.m., gamely trying to spin this astonishing surrender as a "unification" to a room packed with about 50 uncharacteristically skeptical and cranky Alberta journalists.

"When I look out over the crowd today, I think I can actually see people pinching themselves," proclaimed Evan Berger, Progressive Conservative MLA for Livingstone-Macleod, just over a year ago as the sod was turned at the site of the new provincial police college in the windblown Southern Alberta town of Fort MacLeod.

"They're having a hard time accepting that this day is finally here," said Berger, then Alberta's minister of agriculture, who at the time must have been reasonably confident he would soon be attending the opening of the college as a member of Premier Gary Mar's PC cabinet.