Today is the first anniversary of Alberta Premier Alison Redford's unexpected but comfortable election victory.

If you follow Alberta politics, you're bound to have been reading a lot of stuff lately about how unpopular Redford is just now and how she really has no reason to celebrate.

The Forum poll of Canadians' voting intentions publicized yesterday by the National Post cannot be said to contain good news for the most prominent old guys in our nation’s politics -- leastways those that are still in the game.

When they weren't imaging the end of the world in a fiscal holocaust brought on by Keynesianism or worrying about the political end of the world caused by Liberal Dauphin Justin Trudeau's political talents or banished neoconservative hero Tom Flanagan's embarrassing shenanigans, conservative "big thinkers" at the Manning Centre's conference March 7-9 in Ottawa were demonstrating a remarkable tolerance for cognitive dissonance.

Leastways, the obvious differences between the current policies of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government and the prevailing "libertarian" views of the majority of conference participants seemed remarkably un-troubling to the conservatives in conclave.

OTTAWA - Was former Australian PM John Howard sending Canadian conservatives a coded message about their future Saturday, or was his research just not up to snuff now that he's no longer a prime minister?

Howard is a Liberal, which in Australia means he's a conservative, which almost anywhere else would mean he’d be termed a neoliberal, which here in North America requires him to be called a neoconservative, which of course was the reason he was invited to be part of the closing act at Preston Manning's "Big Ideas for Conservatives" bunfest in Ottawa Saturday afternoon.

Still with me?