Alberta, Canada: Pigs Do Fly

“The New Democratic Party (NDP) ended the Progressive Conservatives’ (PC) 44-year rule of the province.

“Political observers were stunned by the result, with one commentator saying: “Pigs do fly”.

“Alberta’s Premier Jim Prentice, a former member of Tory Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet, said he was stepping down from political life.

BBC

Rachel Notley, the new Premier-designate for Alberta, promised “during the campaign, … to withdraw provincial support for the Keystone XL project, raise corporate taxes and also potentially to raise royalties on a regional oil industry already reeling from the collapse in world prices.”

“Ordinary Canadians were reeling from the sheer magnitude of the shift in Alberta, which has placed the country’s most notoriously conservative province, taken for granted as an impregnable redneck kingdom, in the hands of its most progressive regional government. To explain the phenomenon, Toronto-based writer Doug Saunders asked his American Twitter followers to imagine socialist presidential candidate Bernie Saunders “becoming Texas governor by a big majority”.

The Guardian

Now if the US democrats can get a hold of the Notley New Democratic Party play-book and tear up whatever led to the Conservative rout in England, our own 2016 would be looking a lot better.