Not a lot of Albertans read the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper, but those who did, back when Alison Redford became the leader of the Alberta PC Party, must have had a good chuckle.

“Alberta steps into the present,” was the sneering headline of the Globe, a newspaper that has only had white, male editors-in-chief since it was founded back in 1844.

It’s been 170 years, and the old boys at the Globe haven’t been able to find a woman up to the job.

That headline? It’s what psychologists call “projection."

In fact, Alberta has been Canada’s most egalitarian province for a century. The Famous Five suffragettes didn’t come from Ontario. They were Albertans.

Nelly McClung, the first female magistrate in the British Empire, was from Alberta, not Ontario.

Our female chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada is originally from Alberta. Not Ontario.

Redford, unlike Ontario’s Kathleen Wynne, actually won her last election campaign as premier. And if she had lost, Alberta’s premier would have been another woman, Danielle Smith, the leader of the Wildrose opposition.

Alberta’s cities tell a similar story: The mayor of Fort McMurray, Melissa Blake, is a woman. The mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi, is a Muslim.

Perhaps Toronto’s snobbiest newspaper was just expressing its trademark inferiority complex. Normally it obsesses about Toronto being like New York – the Globe loves the phrase “world class” to describe its hometown. How dare Alberta look more cosmopolitan than the bleak sameness of the Globe’s own management.

Despite the Globe’s long-distance Kremlinology, Redford did not win the PC leadership because she was a woman. And she did not lose it because she was a woman. Though that is the dominant narrative in Toronto.

The Globe’s editors actually assigned a Vancouver columnist, Gary Mason, to cover the last Alberta election. When your whole universe is what you can see from the top of the CN Tower, Alberta, B.C. – really, what’s the difference?

The whole scary region on a map, west of Hamilton, may as well have “here be dragons” written on it.

It’s so cute to hear from one of the last un-self-conscious bastions of what pollster Darrell Bricker calls the “Laurentian elites." Those are the folks who used to run Canada – the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto axis. They’re less comfortable with new immigrants, and a booming west, and a political consensus that isn’t built on appeasing Quebec, or Upper Canadian notions of fashion and manners.

They want the political centre of gravity to always stay between Toronto and Montreal. They’re still pretending Ontario is a have province. They’re still pretending Ontario’s auto industry is driving Canada’s economy, instead of its largest corporate welfare case.

The Laurentian elites were rooting for Redford for the same reason they always loved Joe Clark, certainly more than westerners did. Because Clark was a Torontonian’s vision of what an Albertan should be: a Red Tory, and good at losing.

Redford lost because she was a better fit for Ontario than for Alberta. In her first speech in Toronto as premier, she touted wind turbines. This, from the premier of a province with 170 billion barrels of oil. She gave a pay raise to government workers costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. She ran a $2.5-billion deficit, but claimed it was a surplus. She’d be a perfect premier for Ontario.

Or, if her luxurious expense claims could be tamed, perfect as the first female editor-in-chief and publisher of the Globe. But only if the Globe is ready to step into the present.