Alberta’s legislative assembly is a surefire cure for insomnia

If you’re having trouble sleeping these days, with the longer hours of daylight keeping us up and North Korea threatening to blow us up, I have a suggestion: Watch Alberta’s legislature in action.

You’ll be nodding off faster than a backbench MLA during evening debates. You don’t have to bring blankets and pillows down to the legislature to watch. You can do so from the comfort of your own bed by simply tuning in online.

The MLAs are back in the legislature after a weeklong break. But instead of returning filled to the brim with vim, their tanks would seem to be empty.

Based on the lacklustre performance of Monday’s question period, you have to conclude the MLAs have more rigor in their mortis than vigour in their corpus.

Even controversial Wildrose MLA Derek Fildebrandt — a veritable human cattle prod in the assembly — has dialed himself down to innocuous. The best Fildebrandt could do was ask the NDP about election plans: “Will the premier commit right now unequivocally that she will respect our fixed election date legislation and not call an early election before 2019?”

When that didn’t elicit a meaningful response, Fildebrandt tried a different tack. Would the NDP call a late election? “Will they or will they not respect our fixed election date law and commit that they will not delay the next election until 2020?”

I don’t know about you but I’m fighting the urge to yawn.

It’s worth noting that Premier Rachel Notley was not in the assembly on Monday. She was reportedly catching up on events after her 10-day trip to Asia.

Her absence might explain the lack of energy in the assembly. The opposition parties don’t want to waste their best questions on anyone who is not Notley. The government caucus, like any workplace, gets a little slack when the boss is away.

But the MLAs seem distracted, and there are a couple of reasons for that. One of them can be revealed by digging into Fildebrandt’s question.

The Wildrose is worried that Notley will call an election early next year rather than wait until the fixed election window of early 2019. She’d do that, according to jittery Wildrosers, to take advantage of the complicated process to unite the Wildrose and Progressive Conservatives into one party.

Another reason Alberta MLAs seem a bit distracted this week is the British Columbia election campaign. According to the polls, the election, to be held May 9, is a horse race between the governing Liberals and opposition NDP.

The B.C. NDP has said it would do its best to derail the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and stop the shipment of more Alberta oil to the West Coast. An NDP victory there would be a disaster for the NDP here.

If the Wildrose and PCs are up at night worrying about their merger, New Democrats are losing sleep, too. But if MLAs want to get some shut-eye, they need only record the assembly during the day and, at bedtime, watch themselves in action.