It’s been a rough weekend for Ed Stelmach. The private eye spying scandal (or, perhaps, the “Hall & Oates scandal“) continues to grow and, now, front page headlines in Calgary and Edmonton are blasting him hard on patronage. It appears half the board appointments in the province are card carrying Tories and, while they certainly have over half the seats in the province, the number of card carrying Tories is not even remotely close to that. Some board are made up 100% of well connected Conservatives. So, yeah, the optics kind of suck.

On Tuesday, the Tories will break the Socred record as Alberta’s longest serving government. However, given the past year, that one is sure to go over about as well as Barry Bonds’ 756th did this summer.