SarahCanada!

Danielle Smith, Leader, Wildrose Alliance of Alberta

Towering In Polls Over Tired Old PC Regime

Take Over Soon As Premier?

And Later...?

Actually, her name is Danielle Smith, but the comparisons to Sarah Palin are, of course, apt.

Hmm... hey, she's my age, also born at roughly the same time as the old PC dynasty!  Practically still a kid, though certainly not too young to govern.

She's one to watch in the coming years, I'll tell y'all.

Calgary Herald heralds...

Smith was invested enough in the fortunes of the venerable Tory party — which first gained the reins of power in the summer of 1971 and has yet to relinquish them — that she cast a ballot for now-top cabinet minister Ted Morton’s Tory leadership bid in late 2006.

Morton, guarding the Tory right flank, is now considered a prime PC bulwark to the fledgling party’s efforts to siphon conservative support. But Morton’s prominence in the party wasn’t nearly enough to hold the loyalties of Smith, a well-known political newspaper columnist and one-time trustee on the Calgary public school board.

For Smith, faith was broken by a 2008 provincial budget that she says failed to recognize the looming economic meltdown and the red ink to come — a fiscal hue anathema to many residents of the resource-rich province.

“Albertans will tolerate a party for a long period of time until they start seeing incompetence,” she says.

It's a cyclical thing in Alberta politics... every three, four decades, the political tectonic plates shift once the current dynasty shows complacence and/or incompetence.  And, clearly, this earth-shaking transformation is already due.

Hmm... now, here's where we can credibly talk about change and hope (forget about the all-talk-no-substance Obamacrats!) and actually say what we mean and mean what we say (um, I'm a New Brunswicker, but, hey, nothing wrong with putting myself in Albertan shoes for a minute, eh!).

Time will tell... but then again, we're talking about Alberta.  Alberta is unique, distinct, you see...