Head Tale

I haven’t been writing a lot about politics lately but wanted to note a few thoughts as the Saskatchewan provincial campaign is about halfway done and the leaders of the two main parties will have their only debate tomorrow night.

1. There’s still a large gap but some encouraging news in a poll today that shows the NDP is up 5.6 points since the last poll.  Clearly the NDP’s “Putting People First” messaging is resonating.
2. I don’t think Scott Moe is helping his party. Unlike Brad Wall, Moe is where charisma goes to die and his personal history is also a large albatross around his neck.  Farm bankruptcies.  DUI’s that he got charged for.  DUI’s that he didn’t get charged for (and then failed to ever mention.)  Killing a woman in an accident where alcohol wasn’t involved (but even if booze wasn’t involved, I’ve seen a lot of people speculating about the cause of the crash given his other history and a fairly weak “sun got in my eyes” excuse after running a stop sign on a road he presumably traveled regularly.)
3. Honestly, as someone who is shockingly similar to Scott Moe demographically – 47 year old white male raised in a rural community, heck, even born in the same month – I could do a whole entry on the ways his life and mine are similar and different up to and including our personal experiences with drinking and driving.  But that’s a different entry for a different time so I’ll just say that though things have changed for the better from 30 years ago, drinking and driving is still remarkably accepted in rural Saskatchewan (including my home riding by people like the Minister for Sask Government Insurance who *really* should know better at his age) and for that reason I think Moe’s lack of full transparency about these issues during the campaign probably hurts him more in the eyes of voters than the actual details of his long-ago bankruptcies or DUIs.
4. Of course supporters of every party up to and including the Greens, Liberals and Buffalo Party are going to say their goal is to win the election.  As an NDP supporter, that’s my goal too.  But realistically, I have the same (relatively low) bar I had for the past two NDP leaders – get the NDP back to their seat total of 20 from 2007 when the Sask Party first came to power and have the current leader keep his own seat (which surprisingly, neither Lingenfelter or Broten managed to do, even though both were in historically safe NDP seats.)
5. Speaking of the current NDP leader, even before we were in the midst of a global pandemic, I’ve never understood why the NDP doesn’t focus more on the fact that Ryan is a doctor.  And not just a doctor but someone who chose to work in Saskatoon’s inner-city, northern communities and, most importantly from a political standpoint, as a rural relief locum in rural communities around the province.
6. In fact, Ryan’s got an extremely strong biography in general and I’m also not sure they’ve been able to highlight it well enough.  To me, it makes a pretty powerful comparison that while Moe was in his 20’s bankrupting farms and getting DUI’s, Meili was delivering vanloads of prosthetic limbs to landmine victims in Nicaragua and applying for med school.
7. Every single time a Sask Party supporter says “But the NDP closed 52 hospitals…” on any social media platform, a bot needs to post an automatic reply saying “…because Grant Devine nearly bankrupted the province and the NDP had no other option.”
8. Looking at the chart at the top of this post, it looks like the exact same thing is happening again. Even after the largest resource boom in the province’s history (a boom that started under the last NDP government mind you), the current Sask Party government is racking up billions in debt on ridiculous mega-projects like the Regina Bypass, the Carbon Capture Facility, the Global Transportation Hub.
9. It’s beyond disappointing that Scott Moe isn’t showing strong leadership (campaign slogan notwithstanding) by letting politics guide his approach to the pandemic response instead of science (everything from mocking the legitimate concerns of the NDP as the pandemic spread around the globe to being literally hours from calling a snap election as the first case was diagnosed in the province back in March to pushing harder for people to wear masks today – including so many misguided anti-maskers who are part of his base.)
10. I have one other more controversial thought about the current election that I’m not going to post now but I will post depending on how things go on election night in a couple weeks.