Whatever you do with your Monday off this holiday weekend, pause for a moment to think of former premier Don Getty.

It was Getty who introduced Family Day in 1990, much to the displeasure of employers at the time who grumbled it would cost business millions of dollars, and the Alberta Liberals who labelled it a political ploy. No one's complaining about it now. If you think of the former premier at all this weekend, it may be with some gratitude for the mid-winter holiday that has become the legacy of the much maligned Getty era.

It's not really much of a legacy. That's not so much the fault of Getty, but of world energy prices and Ralph Klein: the former because they plummeted as soon as Getty took office, leaving the province with a chronic income problem; and the latter because Klein spent years in office unfairly blaming his predecessor for having a spending problem.

But bad luck and bad press don't make for good legacies. (Getty is actually something of a hero among Alberta's Métis for granting them a form of self-government in 1989, despite strong opposition within his own government. Unfortunately, that's not something most people know or care about. That's left Getty with Family Day as a legacy.) Peter Lougheed, on the other hand, has a litany of legacies, including the Heritage Savings Trust Fund. Ralph Klein left us a debt-free province.

That leads us to a question that's already being asked: What will Ed Stelmach's legacy be?

Teachers should think of him fondly for his politically brave and far-sighted decision in 2007 to assume responsibility for $2 billion worth of teachers' pension liability in exchange for five years of labour peace. But given that many Albertans didn't understand or like the deal and given that the five-year truce is about to expire, as is Stelmach's time as premier, it's a legacy that will be as overlooked as Getty's deal for the Métis.

How about Stelmach's plan to make Alberta more competitive in future decades? Uh, can I get back to you on that -in a couple of decades?

How about a financially risky energy deal tied to an environmentally risky plan to pump carbon dioxide underground?

Those just might become Premier Ed Stelmach's legacy, if energy industry executives are correct. On Thursday, the government announced a deal with North West Upgrading and Canadian Natural Resources to build a facility near Fort Saskatchewan to upgrade government-owned bitumen from the oilsands. The deal includes capturing carbon dioxide emissions from the plant, compressing them into a fluid and pumping them 240 kilometres though a pipeline to central Alberta, where they will be injected underground into old oilfields as a way to extract more oil.

North West chairman Ian MacGregor praised the deal as an example of "how political leadership and vision make Alberta a wonderful place."

The deal certainly fulfils two Stelmach promises: to upgrade more bitumen in Alberta and to pursue carbon capture and storage as a way to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. However, the jury is out. Financial experts say it's too early to say whether the upgrader deal will be good for Alberta. And carbon capture remains an expensive, untried and potentially risky experiment.

Stelmach won't say what he expects his legacy to be, saying that's up to others to decide -but you have to wonder if he really wants his legacy attached to a 240-km pipeline designed to carry industrial effluent.

Legacies are tricky things. Stelmach's advisers and supporters can try to shape his legacy now, but the premier is correct that ultimately others will decide his legacy in the years ahead.

Lougheed's legacy of the savings trust fund, for example, has been raided by his successors to the point that the fund that was worth $13 billion in 1987 is worth about $15 billion today. If that was your retirement fund, you'd have fired your investment adviser by now.

Another of Lougheed's legacies was building up an impressive infrastructure of publicly owned buildings including schools and hospitals during the boom days. But he created an expensive expectation in the public that Getty couldn't afford to maintain during the bust. Getty trimmed spending which didn't win him many friends, but did make Klein's job easier when he took over as premier just in time for boom times to return. Klein paid off the province's debt, but in doing so built up a massive infrastructure deficit that Stelmach inherited just in time for the 2008 financial crisis.

So, you could say that Lougheed's popular legacy made things worse for Getty, whose unpopular legacy made things better for Klein, whose popular legacy made governing more difficult for Stelmach. If the pattern holds true, Stelmach will be saddled with an unpopular legacy that will, in fact, have made conditions better for his successor.

Not fair, perhaps.

But Stelmach doesn't get to write his own legacy. We can't write it, either.

It'll be up to others in the years ahead to look back and determine if having Stelmach's name connected to a pipeline of compressed gas is really a legacy worth having.

gthomson@edmontonjournal.com