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The new NDP government’s Bill 1 outlaws political contributions from corporations and labour unions. The PCs’ late-arriving campaign report shows how damaging this will be to the Natural Governing Party of Alberta. It was able, one last time, to harvest the gratitude of companies who did well out of the long PC dynasty.

There’s $6,750 from West Edmonton Mall Property Inc., a business that would not exist in its current form without a friendly provincial regime and its oddball quasi-bank ATB. TransAlta Corp., found guilty this summer of unlawfully manipulating a PC-deregulated electricity market, chipped in $17,000. River Cree Casino, a brainchild of the Ralph Klein PCs, forwarded $15,000 in gambler’s losings. Liquor Stores GP Inc., the kernel of a TSE-traded business empire built on Klein’s privatization of liquor retailing, gave $10,000 (with another personal $15,000 from founder Irving Kipnes).

There is something almost poignant about these line items. They are, in an odd way, a quantitative summary of the last forty years in Alberta — a requiem in numbers for times that were mostly good, for most of us. They are also, taken together, one explanation for why the voters of Alberta finally got their knives out for the PCs.

But the gratitude toward the PCs is real, as Rome’s gratitude toward the slain Caesar was real; and it lingers, none the less because many of Alberta’s economic indicators are tipping into the panic zone under the New Democrats. That gratitude explains Brian Jean’s Nov. 14 speech to the annual general meeting of the Wildrose Party he led into Official Opposition status in May.