Once upon a time, while Alberta's premier was telling fairy tales to impressionable children, some of her senior officials were spinning fairy stories of their own.

Actually, this all happened yesterday.

The premier told a group of Grade 1 students at an Edmonton school library a story about a good princess named Alison, who built schools for children just like them, and a very bad princess named Danielle, who wouldn't build any schools at all!

The Alison in question, of course, is Premier Alison Redford herself, the one telling the story. The Danielle is Danielle Smith, leader of the Opposition Wildrose Party. And maybe Redford didn't use exactly those words, but you get the general idea.

As is well known, Advanced Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk has sent a letter to the boards of all of Alberta post-secondary institutions instructing them on what their bargaining position and final wage offer must be in negotiations with their faculty associations and staff unions.

The position can be summed up in the phrase, now frequently heard on college and university campuses throughout the province, "Zero, zero, zero."

Should Chuck Strahl be able to serve simultaneously on the board of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, a partisan political organization tied to the ruling Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other provincial conservative parties, and on the apolitical Security Intelligence Review Committee?

The SIRC is supposed to be, in the words of its website, "an independent, external review body which reports to the Parliament of Canada on the operations of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service."

The foundations of the regional planning crisis that prompted a frustrated Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths to threaten Edmonton-area municipalities with forced amalgamation were laid by the destructive policies announced by premier Ralph Klein's sidekick Steve West back in 1993.

On Oct. 7 of that year, West, the Vermilion veterinarian and MLA who acted in a variety of portfolios as Klein's minister of dismantling public services, marched to the front of a meeting of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association and proclaimed that the government would be pulling the plug on the province's internationally respected system of regional planning.