It was heartening to finally see Alberta Premier Alison Redford showing some backbone last week, and standing up federal NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair like a bad date with bad breath when he made his foray into the oilsands.

Was Mulcair there to learn or to preach?

Well, it turns out he came, he saw, and he condescended, backing off somewhat on his rhetoric, but not his message.

Let's be straight. No one is onto Muclair more than Sun Media's Edmonton-based columnist Lorne Gunter, who has described this Quebec sycophant as "uninformed" and "hypocritical," and has cited his "holier than thou" message on the oilsands as being nothing but bunkum.

Anyone who uses the outrageous hyperbole of comparing the ethics of the Alberta oilsands to the blood-drenched oil fields of Nigeria, which the socialist Mulcair has done in the Commons as Leader of the Official Opposition, is either playing Crazy 8s with a euchre deck or has a hole in his bag of marbles.

As Gunter put it recently on the Charles Adler Show on the Sun News Network, if Mulcair wants to talk about his environmental concerns regarding the oilsands, then perhaps he might want to discuss the ethics behind the giant open-pit asbestos mines in his province of Quebec.

Or does that hit too close to home?

Mulcair keeps talking about a "Quebec model" for development -- which he claims brings "economical, social and environmental" balance -- but continually evades the fact that Quebec's economy would be in the ditch if not for the $8 billion to $10 billion it annually receives in equalization payments from Ottawa.

Those payments represent an astounding 12% of the Quebec government's annual revenues.

Mulcair claims Canada suffers from what some U.S.-funded dink tank dubbed "oilsands fever" -- the Canadian version of the so-called "Dutch disease," and allegedly the reason Canada (Ontario?) has lost so many manufacturing jobs -- but fails to consider the oilsands also manufactures Canada's economic security and wealth.

Instead of being with Mulcair in Fort McMurray, Redford chose to be at a Virginia meeting with the elite and secretive Bilderberg bunch, global powerbrokers comprised of politicians, royalty, academics, presidential advisers, billionaires and bank chairmen.

She made the right choice.