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.

Is somebody going around trying to pull a Mitt Romney on Preston Manning and the boys.

Romney, alert readers will recall, was the U.S. Republican presidential candidate who not so long ago was captured in a digital recording telling a bunch of well-wishers that, oh, about 47 per cent of the American population is made up of lazy bums so dependent on government handouts they're willing to do anything -- even vote for Barack Obama -- to stay that way!

If you enjoy playing Clue, you'll appreciate the irony that it was the Bartender, in the Dining Room, with a Cellphone, who did in Romney.

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.

Here's some free advice for a couple of would-be Canadian prime ministers who are both in the news these days, the NDP's Tom Mulcair and the Liberals' Justin Trudeau: Hammer Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the economy.

Both of them were with their party faithful yesterday -- Mulcair at the final day of the NDP's policy convention in Montreal and Trudeau at his coronation as Liberal leader in the evening in Ottawa. Either of them, it is said here, has the potential to form the next government of Canada if the planets line up the right way.

But that means, to succeed, something is going to have to go wrong for Harper -- because, as we pretty well all know, more often than not opposition parties don't win elections so much as governments lose them.