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EDMONTON — First there was Peter the Great, then King Ralph - and now Emperor Ed.
It may be difficult to think of a shy, stammering farmer whose first priority in this election was to plow his own driveway as Emperor - an Emperor chosen by only 41.3 per cent of his people - but consider the conquests of Ed Stelmach:
He took the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party when no one even thought him in the race, becoming the "Premier by Default" when the two runaway front-runners ran into each other at top speed.
He took the party Peter Lougheed first brought to power in 1971 and he extended the PC dynasty to its 11th straight majority. He did better in his first campaign than any of his predecessors, including the once hugely popular leader he succeeded, Ralph Klein.
Stelmach took 72 seats when some embarrassed experts were looking for a minority government or even worse, and in doing so he cut the Liberals nearly in half to a mere nine seats, the NDP in half to a pitiful two seats and wiped the "conservative" alternative Wildrose Alliance off the blackboard.
They wondered privately how long he might last as leader, but now they wonder openly how long Liberal Leader Kevin Taft and NDP Leader Brian Mason can hang on after such crushing defeats.
As for Wildrose Alliance Leader Paul Hinman, he will ask for a recount, since he lost by just 39 votes, but admitted to the media there was "probably not much" ahead in his political future.
Taft, Mason and Hinman obviously learned their bitter lessons as the results rolled in late Monday night, but there are lessons here for others, as well.
A lesson for democracy.
A lesson for Canada.
They called it a landslide and indeed it was, but you could hardly call this a victory for democracy. When Klein won his last campaign four years ago, they said the turnout, 45 per cent, had never been so low. It plummeted to 41.3 per cent this time, a new record for voter apathy.
Barely 12 per cent of the electorate tuned into the only leaders' debate they held.
The people never seemed to talk election unless they were spoken to about it.
It was far less a player in the provincial conversation than the Flames, the Oilers and the weather - ranking somewhere around whether or not you should wear a hat if going out.
What such a pathetic turnout meant is that the 37-year dynasty of Lougheed-Getty-Klein-Stelmach gets spoken of as if a vast majority of Albertans wish for nothing else. In fact, in three of the past six elections, a majority of voters did not even vote PC.
Alberta now stands as Example No. 1 for those who feel the first-past-the-post system of voting distorts reality.
As Fair Vote Canada pointed out, Stelmach won an impressive 53 per cent of the vote - but he "should not be rewarded with 88 per cent of the seats."
More than 100,000 Albertans voted for the two ends of the political spectrum, Wildrose Alliance and Green, yet they end up with no representation at all.
But that is democracy the way Canadians have chosen to play it, and it is unlikely to change any time soon.
What does seem to have changed in this part of Canada, and dramatically, is the people's sense of the environment as a real and immediate issue.
During the time of Stéphane Dion's surprising reach for the leadership of the federal Liberal Party, during the months of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and David Suzuki's cross-country odyssey, the environment soared to the No. 1 issue in the land and appeared, for once, to be sticking there.
There were fears expressed that it was partly due to fad - in particular, Gore's Hollywood treatment of global warming - and fears, as well, that if the economy ever turned, the environment was on its own.
Canadians, North Americans and perhaps even the rest of the world need to look at what happened in Alberta this week.
First, the turnout shows how precious little voters here care about anything.
Second, the environment failed entirely to become an issue in a jurisdiction where oil and gas development rule.
It would be wrong, however, to suggest Alberta has no environmentalists.
Quite the contrary, some of the best minds and hearts in the country are to be found here.
Stelmach's environmental platform was to do nothing for a dozen years, and then work slowly to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 14 per cent by 2050 - a standard that makes Ottawa's projections read like a Suzuki letter to Santa Claus. As for the oil sands development, let it go - so long as future oil and gas royalties increased slightly for the provincial government.
The Liberals wanted an overall royalty increase of 20 per cent a year - with a hard cap on greenhouse-gas emissions within five years.
As one voter in Calgary put it, it all came down to "beer" for his friends who actually bothered to vote.
"If this place goes Liberal," he said in a voting day e-mail, "there goes the oil companies, there goes the only jobs available - and there goes the beer.
"Vote Liberal, no beer.
"Simple."
