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Peter Lougheed would later admit it was the biggest mistake of his long and successful political life.

It was, of course, allowing himself to be photographed clinking champagne glasses with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau back in 1981 after the pair had made some tweaks in Alberta’s favour to the reviled National Energy Program, then devastating this province.

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The Alberta premier never repeated the mistake because this was a time when separation talk was in the prairie air and mannequins of Trudeau were being hoisted and burned atop otherwise idle drilling rigs in places such as Leduc.

I missed that particular episode by a few months, later arriving in Edmonton from the post-industrial wasteland of North East England, where they would have hoisted and burned not mannequins but Margaret Thatcher herself if she’d dared set foot on Tyneside back then.

By that spring of 1982 Alberta was hurting: thousands losing their jobs as international energy companies left the province, houses sold for a single buck to the infamous dollar-dealers as families fled back to places they’d once arrived from such as Ontario and the Maritimes, while Lougheed famously announced a mortgage subsidy program from the rainy day fund because, as he said in that provincewide evening TV broadcast: “Folks, it’s raining out there.”