In the midst of masterofhisdomain-gate, I seem to have missed this bit of news out of Alberta:

Alberta’s political right may be in for a realignment in 2008, with the Alberta Alliance and Wildrose Party preparing for a merger before the next election.

If the union is accepted by members of both parties, the new Wildrose Alliance Party of Alberta will run a full slate of candidates in the next election.

Before people get too excited about this merger, this is only slightly more significant than the eventual Marxist-Leninist/Communist Party merger that we all know is inevitable at the federal level. So, in the scheme of things, this is probably slightly less worrisome for Ed Stelmach than losing his domain name to some shit disturbing blogger and slightly more worrisome than getting a mustard stain out of his favourite suit.

For those outside of Alberta (which includes, I guess, me), the Alliance came into being in 2002, picking up 1 seat and 9% of the vote in the 2004 election. Given recent polls and by-election results, I tend to think 9% would be their best case scenario in the upcoming election.

As for the Wild Rose Party, their long and storied history will come to a close if this merger is ratified. Let’s give them a moment of silence before moving on.

Should Wild Rose party members decide to kill their weeks of history in a bid to blow past the SoCreds on the relevancy scale, the new party would be cleverly named the Wild Rose Alliance (or, “Wild Alliance” for short) and would be led by Alberta Alliance leader Paul Hinman. This shouldn’t be a major surprise given that the Wild Rose Party never selected a leader.