People love lists, I’m told, and so here’s my quick list of the best and worst of Alberta politics over the last year.

Best of Alberta politics: The demise of Alberta’s anything-goes approach to oilsands development. Neither the energy industry nor its puppets in the Alberta government can reverse the public’s shifting view of the oilsands after 500 ducks landed on a toxic Syncrude tailings pond. The outrage over the ducks was unprecedented, and Premier Ed Stelmach will be forced to change his hands-off approach as calls for sustainable development of the oilsands grow in number and volume. This is great news for the province. Even a federal court recently stood up to a major energy company, Imperial Oil, for its flawed Kearl environmental assessment. The days of companies making their own rules in northern Alberta are clearly numbered.

Best of Alberta politics, runner-up: The aftermath of the Conservative election landslide. The opposition got annihilated and most Albertans didn’t vote, which is obviously a poor reflection on our alleged democracy. Now opposition parties, namely the Liberals, are being forced to honestly confront their irrelevance. That’s a positive. Some Grit MLAs are even speaking openly about the possibility a new party. I’m not foolish enough to try and predict what will happen over the next three years, but if a centrist, thoughtful party emerges because of the Liberals’ dismal failure in 2008, we could see the end of the Tory dynasty. One day. Possibly. Maybe. That would be good news.

Worst of Alberta politics: Fast Forward broke an important but largely ignored story in November when the provincial government dismissed an independent report into contaminants downstream from the oilsands. People in Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca have long been concerned about how the water is affecting their health, so the report was big news for them.

However, government spokespeople told journalists that the report, which found higher-than-normal contaminant levels in the Athabasca River, was “misleading,” even though it was peer-reviewed by University of Alberta water ecologist David Schindler and two other scientists.

Several news outlets dutifully quoted the government spokespeoples’ negative comments about the report. The government tried to feed the same story to Fast Forward as well, but there was a giant flaw: the government hadn’t even seen the final version of the report. What happened was that the health authority in Fort Chip had sent a draft to Health Canada because it wanted the department to issue an advisory on fish, given the report’s findings. Health Canada then gave the draft to the Alberta government. The report’s author, Sherwood Park ecologist Kevin Timoney, said that transaction — he called it a “leak” — should never have happened. The Alberta government used the draft to attack Timoney’s credibility in the press before seeing the final version of the report.

Timoney told Fast Forward afterwards that the government’s “dirty trick” showed “a great disrespect” to the people of Fort Chipewyan. The community, meanwhile, is still waiting for the baseline health study requested by its advocate doctor, John O’Connor. The government continues to brush off that request, an indifference that reflects badly on all Albertans.

Worst of Alberta politics, runner-up: The provincial election. Not the outcome, which may be a good or bad news story depending on where you stand, but the election itself. Not only did the Conservatives get away with appointing well-connected Conservatives to run election-day polls, but Elections Alberta made it incredibly difficult for people to vote in a province notorious for its already low voter turnout. Voter lists were incomplete and Elections Alberta’s website was inaccessible for much of voting day. The end result was a voter turnout of 41 per cent. When I contacted Elections Alberta to ask why the website went down, a spokesperson said it was due to high volume. “Between 4 and 6 [p.m.], we had over 100,000 hits,” she said.

That’s a sorry excuse. Alberta had more than 2.25 million eligible voters in this election, so just over four per cent of eligible voters went to check their polling location online after work, and this mild interest caused the site to crash. If we need any more evidence that we live in a one-party state, surely this is it: our election agency isn’t prepared for even a small percentage of Albertans to vote. The act of electing is becoming irrelevant. If four per cent catches Elections Alberta by surprise, just imagine what would happen if most Albertans bothered to look up their polling station and vote.