Sitting at the breakfast table all those years ago listening to his daddy, Justin Trudeau would doubtless have been warned about those nasty, argumentative far-off Albertans.
Back in Pierre's time it was the unlikely duo of Alberta and Quebec that refused to fall for the pan-Canadian vision so beloved of the Montreal and Ottawa elite.
Nope, not back in Peter Lougheed's day. In fact it was the Alberta premier who was then the mainstay of harnessed western solidarity among provincial leaders from Manitoba westward.
Back then party labels often fell aside and a united front met any attempt to browbeat the West. It wasn't always successful -- just think of the National Energy Program -- but we knew where we stood and it sure as heck wasn't in Trudeau's pocket.
Today the younger version must be wondering if those old stories of Wild Rose intransience were just a figment of papa's fertile imagination. But then PET never had a premier like Rachel Notley at the table wearing Alberta colours.
If only that neighbouring lot in B.C. and Saskatchewan could be as accommodating as good old Alberta, then Justin could have posed for even more selfies in celebrating Canada's relentless move to a carbon priced Nirvana.
But Brad Wall and Christy Clark had other ideas about the federal carbon pricing policy (actually, before going any further, let's call the 50 bucks a tonne plan by its real name – a carbon tax.)
Our neighbouring premiers refused to lie back, smile and think of pipelines that may never come to fruition, as Trudeau The Second performed his “we'll save the planet” shtick.
Nope, both Wall and Clark rightly expressed serious worries that the difference between Ontario and Quebec's cap-and-trade offsetting carbon plan and the West's 50-buck levy could put us at a serious competitive disadvantage.
And that's just within Canada. The new Trump Empire to the south will be scrapping energy regulations faster than The Donald can blow dry his bonce, so our relentless single-minded rush to increase costs on all Canadian industry is frightening.
Wall did his best Ralph Klein impersonation, short of wandering off to the casino as the former Alberta premier famously did at one of these first ministers' get-togethers, by blasting the feds over such a move.
As for Clark, the best political gambler in the country, she kept her chips closer to heart, and successfully got an agreement with Ottawa that any inter-provincial difference caused by such a new tax will be fully studied before implementation. If it puts B.C. at a disadvantage then the Lotus-eaters to the west of us are out.
And while these shenanigans were taking place, where was Alberta – so often deemed the bad-boy province of Confederation?
Well, we were playing nice, secure in the knowledge the two pipelines Trudeau signed off on a week earlier would bring salvation to a province reeling under an unemployment rate that hasn't hit these awful heights since before Steve Jobs first pulled first out that iPhone.
Trust is a fine thing, but in politics it should be doled out in tiny increments.
Instead we have bet the wind farm that this scratch-each-other's-back deal between Notley and Trudeau, in which we sign on to the full carbon tax in exchange for the federal green light for pipelines, will actually mean more Alberta crude making its way to tidewater.
There's a long, tough road ahead before we know if that bet will pay off for Notley and for this province.
Maybe Ralph had it spot-on. A trip to the casino offers much better odds of a payout than any deal with Ottawa.
