Another day, another distress flare.

Of course, that’s not what Premier Rachel Notley would call her announcement Tuesday that she’s opening the door to construction of a new oil refinery in Alberta.

She’d argue she’s simply looking for ways to create oilfield jobs at a time when the province’s energy industry is under siege.

But this week’s announcement comes a week after she declared her government will cut oil production by 8.7 per cent to boost prices.

That, in turn, came a week after she unveiled plans to buy up to 7,000 rail tank cars and 80 locomotives to move more of Alberta’s oil to the West Coast for shipment to Asia.

These are not signs of a government confidently navigating choppy seas.

This is a government whose ship is being swamped, most notably by the tsunami that is depressed world oil prices. As if that weren’t bad enough, there’s the rogue wave that is the “price differential” between the world price and the depressed price Alberta receives for its land-locked product.

The Notley government has been so overwhelmed, both fiscally and politically, that it’s pretty much navigating by periscope.

Hence the distress flares Notley has been launching the past few weeks, hoping to attract the attention of the federal government and the Canadian public. But mostly, she’s trying to let Alberta voters know she’s doing everything she can, and even some things she can’t, to help the province’s energy sector.

She can’t, for example, build an oil refinery.

These things take $10 billion and 10 years to build.

Notley has neither the time nor the money.

Not that she’s saying she’ll actually have her government build one. She’s merely saying her government has issued a “Request for Expression of Interest,” which is a bit like launching a distress rocket hoping energy companies will come to her aid.

Indeed, she insists there are companies interested in constructing a refinery, and she’s hoping to get the “lay of the land.”

More to the point, the request for expression of interest will allow them to “offer up the kind of support they’re looking for” — because there is no way any company would commit itself to such an expensive and time-consuming project without government help of some kind.

But Notley doesn’t want to say that right now, not after she’s talked about spending an undisclosed amount of money to buy 7,000 rail cars — and not after she browbeat Prime Minister Justin Trudeau into buying the Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion and possibly spending another $9 billion or so on an expansion project.

Taxpayers — provincially and federally — would likely look askance at more government spending to get Alberta oil to market.

But the pipeline project is stalled, and putting more oil trains on the tracks will take at least a year.

Notley needs more good news from the oil patch; she just doesn’t want to commit her government. At least, not yet.

She has managed to squeeze out some good news, thanks to a spike in the price Alberta receives for its oil. That’s due to her declaration the government will curtail production by 325,000 barrels a day beginning Jan. 1. But Notley knows as well as anyone the vagaries of oil prices. What goes up always comes down.

She’s looking for some less volatile good news before the provincial election.

And that election might be coming sooner than anyone expected.

Last week, Notley suggested she could drop the writ as early as February.

This week, she said the deadline for industry to express an interest in building a new refinery is Feb. 8.

Hmm. It’s almost as if Notley wants to use the election campaign to announce a refinery deal worth hundreds of jobs and billions of dollars.

Economists are pulling out their hair, saying building a refinery is not the way to create long-term jobs.

And Alberta’s official opposition, the United Conservative Party (UCP), was happy to dismiss Notley’s “non-announcement” as the “latest ploy from a tired, broke, and increasingly desperate government quickly approaching the 2019 election.”

The opposition’s attack implies a UCP government wouldn’t be in as desperate a situation as the NDP; that the UCP would somehow have managed to get a pipeline built by now, and would have wiped out the price differential.

That would be bending the imagination to the surreal.

But the UCP isn’t in government. It can happily try to throw cold water on Notley’s distress flares.

And Notley will keep on launching them, from now through the upcoming election, trying to entice industry players to respond — but, most of all, hoping sympathetic Alberta voters come to her aid.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.