You can’t blame the provincial NDP government for grasping at economic straws. When it comes to economic growth and job creation, straws are all they’ve got to grasp at.

Take the boast Monday by Economic Development Minister Deron Bilous that the Alberta Jobs Plan “is working to create jobs and diversify the economy in the face of economic challenges.”

The NDP are positively giddy about the fact that “between Aug. 1 and Oct. 31, the provincial economy added 25,000 jobs.”

No denying, that’s preferable to the economy losing more jobs.

But that’s not as sunny a stat as Bilous would have Albertans believe. In the exact same press release as the NDP patted itself on the back, the Notley government admits “between May 1 and July 31, 27,400 jobs were lost.”

That means that while an encouraging number of jobs have been created over the past three months, those gains failed to make up for all the jobs lost in the three months before that.

Bilous blamed the losses between the beginning of May and the end of July on the Wood Buffalo wildfire and “stubbornly low world oil prices.” So isn’t it just possible that job growth since that is simply due to recovery from the fire?

The fire in and around Fort McMurray in early May could have disrupted work around the province until mid-summer. That’s feasible. It was a huge natural disaster.

So it is also possible that much of the hiring since then has simply been recovery from the fire. Indeed, it is more likely that post-disaster re-hiring has had more to do with who this fall’s positive economic news than the government’s hodgepodge of make-work, bureaucrat driven “investment.”

But the long and the short of it is that despite the NDP’s sunny announcement on Monday, Alberta still has 2,400 fewer jobs than it did six months ago.

Go grasp at that straw.

There are at least 47,000 fewer Albertans working now than when the NDP took over in May 2015, and that accounts for the 25,000 hired in the past three months. Calgary has the highest unemployment rate of any major city in the country – worse than cities with traditionally high unemployment such as St. John’s, Newfoundland and Moncton, New Brunswick.

And remember, in recent years, St. John’s has become an oil town, too, so it is suffering from lower oil prices just like Alberta.

Saskatchewan’s unemployment rates is almost two percentage points lower than Alberta’s.

And keep this in mind when Bilous or any other New Democrat claims there are glimmers of hope coming from the resource sector: In 2017, more conventional oil exploration wells will be drilled in Saskatchewan than in Alberta.

And Saskatchewan has just one-quarter of Alberta’s population.

But what Saskatchewan also has is a pro-oil, pro-investment government; a government that isn’t racking up insane debt or driving away business with exorbitant taxes, outrageous spending, skyrocketing minimum wage and massive regulations.

Yet as the provincial economy painstakingly recovers and oil prices slowly rise, there will be those who wrongly credit the NDP’s jobs plan. There will begin to be some who think the NDP deserve a second term – that they aren't THAT bad.

Which brings me to the insanity of the past weekend’s Tory convention in Red Deer.

All the PC’s leadership candidates, except former federal cabinet minister Jason Kenney, were vehemently opposed to uniting the Wildrose and the Tories into a single juggernaut of a party that could easily send the NDP out of office in 2019.

This is a selfish stance that puts the PC’s ambitions of a return to power ahead of what is good for the province.