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Those rumours were always vigorously denied by Liberals until 2002. Then former party insider John Duffy, in his award-winning book on Canadian elections Fights of Our Lives, confirmed he had indeed been in the room when Liberal campaign chairman Keith Davey uttered the phrase.

I sense we are headed for a second “Screw the West!” (or at least a “Screw Alberta!”) election this fall as the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, badly damaged by the SNC-Lavalin scandal, try desperately to hold on to seats wherever they can. (And since that won’t be in Alberta, they can write off our province and do whatever they want to us.)

Since Alberta elected a UCP government under premier-designate Jason Kenney, there have been rumblings in Liberals circles that this offers the federal government the perfect foil to demonstrate their “progressive” credentials and firm up their lib-left voter base.

That’s why the Liberals have doubled down on climate change and carbon taxes, and why the prime minister has tried labelling opposition leader Andrew Scheer a neo-Nazi sympathizer.

And it’s also why killing Trans Mountain may make sense inside the Liberal war room.

It may also explain why there have been so many claims recently that Alberta is a hotbed for white-nationalist extremism. If the Libs and their media friends can associate Alberta with destruction of the environment AND violent racism — double whammy!

It doesn’t matter that StatsCan (based on figures supplied by police forces across the country) shows the recent spike in extremist crimes has occurred mainly in Ontario and Quebec. That is ignored because it doesn’t fit the central Canadian narrative.