As I mentioned yesterday, soon after the last Sask NDP Leadership Race in 2013, with Ryan Meili’s extremely close loss to Cam Broten still fresh and painful, I posted that I wanted two main things from the new Leader:
1) in the short term, genuine, humble outreach to other teams to acknowledge what a close race it had been and to draw everyone together
2) in the longer term, to get the party back to at least the 20-seat level it had been at before the disastrous experiment with bringing Dwain Lingenfelter as Leader so it would be clear the NDP was heading in the right direction.
My take is that the first point never happened which led directly to the failure on the second point.
Instead, last night, the NDP ended up with only one more seat (gaining two and losing one) compared to what they had going into the election. Apparently, they also ended up with *less* of the overall vote share since the Sask Party recently added three new seats in the province.
On top of that, I think it was beyond shocking for most observers to see the one seat lost belonged to NDP Leader Cam Broten who was upset in an extremely close race in what was probably the nail biter of the night.
There’s all kinds of things I’m thinking and would love to say in the mother-of-all “I Told You So!” posts – good, bad, ugly, angry, sad, sentimental, resentful, conciliatory, and even humourous – but given that the result was probably worse than anyone predicted, I think I’m going to skip all that for the moment.
(Okay, I’ll share a humourous one – one colleague looking for bright spots mentioned that the NDP now have perfect gender parity in the legislature – five men and five women. I responded that if Nicole White had won her close race in Saskatoon, she’d join Nicole Sarauer and Nicole Rancourt as new MLA’s and the NDP would also be well on the way to “Nicole” parity too!) 😉
Anyhow, instead of loudly blaring “I Told You So!” and unnecessarily rubbing salt into a lot of people’s wounds today, as gently and quietly, as possible, I’ll just say…
Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
[…] The Saskatchewan NDP got a shellacking in the provincial election last Monday, a loss which many are blaming at least partly on still lingering divisions between the 50.3% of the party that supported Cam Broten and the 49.7% of the party that supported Ryan Meili in the last NDP leadership race. This setback for the Sask NDP was capped by the shocking loss of the Leader Cam Broten’s own seat. […]
Post a Comment