This is a very cool poster that Ryan Meili’s team created during his 2013 leadership run.
The design may be retro but the message is more timely than ever as Saskatchewan and the entire world try to figure out the best way forward in the midst of a worldwide pandemic.
I don’t know about you but I think we’d be wise to have a doctor in the Premier’s office helping to guide the way!
Does Molly Thomas still live in Sask? If not, weird optics to fly in a debate moderator from out-of-province during a pandemic.
Moe looks very nervous right out of the gate, not what I expected from the Premier and frontrunner.
Drink! Moe says NDP has record of shutting things down (without acknowledging it was his party that created debts that led to that point!)
Question about covid response. I don’t know about you but think I’ll trust the doctor over the failed farmer on major questions of health. I mean, Meili literally wrote a book called “A Healthy Society”.
Moe: “Our main challenges are when people aren’t following public health guidelines” (like when I show up at an ice cream shop and pose for a photo without socially distancing or wearing a mask?)
Is it an optical illusion or are Meili and Moe less than six feet apart?
Mask mandate question. Moe looks even more nervous if that’s possible, stammering and stuttering. Don’t want to piss off the anti-maskers.
Why do they do “open debate” segments so they just talk over each other or monopolize the mic? (Quick revision – the first one looked like it was going off the rails like Broten vs. Wall Part Deux but didn’t really happen for rest of debate.)
Moe: “We’ve itemized the items!” What I hear: “Propane and propane accessories!”
Moe: (outloud) “Saskatchewan has a plan to balance the budget in 2024…” (quiet) “…by selling off SaskTel and other Crown Corps.” (To be fair, soon after, I think he says they won’t sell off Crown Corps. I don’t believe him but he does say it.)
Moe channelling his best Donald Trump talking over Meili and the moderator.
Moe probably doesn’t want to bring up the North Battleford hospital as an example of great planning and foresight #200ProblemsAndALeakingRoofIsJustOne (
Moe: “Food, fuel and fertilizer” is how Sask has created wealth for generations. And “stuck in the mud, status quo, and same old, same old” are also appropriate alliterations at this moment.
Meili showing the most rage so far: “A thirteen cent rage, er, raise to the minimum wage isn’t enough.” 🙂
Moe is looking really rattled. I’m honestly glad that there’s a doctor on the stage!
Sorry to harp on this but Moe seems unprepared. Entitled knowing what the polls say so he didn’t put in the work?
Meili: “You sent two of your Ministers to basically say ‘get off my lawn'”. Line of the night?
Question: “Kids have backslid massively during quarantine” Moe (probably) “I guess we cut schools and libraries some more.”
Elephant in the room – does Moe’s DUI history (including lack of disclosure about a DUI charge that was dropped) come up tonight?
I’ve been a Meili supporter since his first run in 2009 and can’t believe how far he’s come as a debater. Moe is out of his depth.
Moe says the drugs on our streets now are a lot more deadly than the drugs that were on the streets a few years ago. Me: Hmmm, how does he know?
And just like that, it’s over. Wow – that went fast!
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.)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
If that performance wasn’t enough to make your hair stand on end, White also played his second song of the show on a guitar designed by Eddie Van Halen with some tribute signature Van Halen tapping added to the song…
(
