Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
Saskatchewan labour laws now before courts
Keep your eye on this case. These bills are wildly unpopular in the trade union movement. The Wall Government seems bent on a war with organized labour. The outcome of this court challenge will determine in what direction this war will move next
Reclaiming the NDP legacy
This is a great piece, and is worth your time to read. I have nothing to add to it.
Fewer women now in the Saskatchewan Legislature
This is an interesting development. Is this a problem in the greater scheme of things? Not really. This result is a reflection of fewer women deciding to seek public office in this province. If more women choose to run for a seat in the legislature in future election, this result will then change.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
A 2013 leadership race for the Saskatchewan NDP?
Some New Democrats want to put off a leadership race until 2013. There may be some benefits to that, but there is also a downside to it to. Now I'm not a Saskatchewan New Democrat, so perhaps I have no business adding my two cents worth here, but I will anyhow. The longer it takes for the NDP to elect a new leader, the more likely it is for permanent divisions to form and harden in their party. Long contests can be very divisive, and are a distraction from other more worthwhile party building efforts. If I was active in a party that is used to winning but had just suffered a huge election loss, I would want a new leader to hit the sandal and get on with the rebuilding effort, instead of delaying it. In short, putting off a vote until 2013 would result in a two-year leadership race.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Saskatchewan Youth voted Saskatchewan Party in droves
The Youth vote in Saskatchewan has been moving away from the New Democrats for years now. The trend began in the 1980s when the 'Baby Bust' generation first came of voting again, and the trend appears to be gaining strength. For Saskatchewan New Democrats who wish to understand why this is happening, they should start listening to the young people who are in their party. Most of the youngish New Democrats I know are much like young Liberals and young conservatives in the province; they are hard working, ambitious, and probably relate more to individual cues than collective ones. Many are savvy investors and are more interested in self-employment than belonging to a union. They are concerned about poor people and social equality, but also want to be able to reward themselves.
Many young New Democrats in Saskatchewan mention this man as someone who inspires them. While these young people are quick to point out that they part with Paul on some economic stuff, how long can it be before they ultimately buy into his economic message as well?
No immediate cabinet shuffle for Wall
Premier Wall is keeping his cabinet the same for now. I thought the Premier would add some new faces to cabinet right away. I guess there is no rush.
Occupy Regina given eviction notice from Victoria Park
Here's the story. Now a confrontation looms. We shall soon see how this plays out.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
The New Saskatchewan
If you get a free moment, you should read this.I doubt the Saskatchewan Party Government will embark on a campaign in term 2 to privatize Crown Corporations. The Sask Party just got through an election convincing voters that privatization is not on the public agenda. To make a reversal on the Crowns now would cause a political explosion in this province. Some day there will need to be a rational debate on creating a process to wind down or sell Crown Corporations in Saskatchewan that are no longer in the public interest. But unleashing a secret agenda to sell Crown Corporations at firesale prices would only create a nasty and vicious political war in this province at this point in time. Too many individuals in Saskatchewan have a direct stake in the Crowns for such an agenda to ever proceed.
Saskatchewan now has a Highway of Heroes
This is a great idea.
Now everytime someone drives between Regina and 15 Wing Moose Jaw, they can think about the supreme sacrifice made by our soldiers who never returned home from war. This is a great day for all of the people of our province.
Art Mainil, 78, passes
You can read about Art's contribution to Saskatchewan politics here.
Sask Politics 1 extends its sincere condolences to family and friends of Art Mainil at this time.
Sask Politics 1 extends its sincere condolences to family and friends of Art Mainil at this time.
Saskatchewan Election Post-Mortem: One more look at the results
A day makes a difference in politics, especially when it comes to analysis and perspective.
The big thing that everyone is asking now that the 2011 has come and gone, is "where do we go from here?" That's a really good question. I might be able to shed some light on that answer, we'll see.
Many Saskatchewan folks now wonder if the Sask Party will win a third term in 2015. Given that the Sask Party increased its seat total from 38 to 49 in this election, a third term is not beyond the pale. But a third term can't be forecast with any certainty until we know a couple of things;
- We have to know what direction the Wall Government will take in its second term - will it be left or right?
- Will Premier Wall continue his war with the unions? Continuing to pick fights with unions in sectors like health care may backfire in time. Also, having labour peace in the province will ultimately be good for our economy.
- Who will the NDP elect as their next leader, and
- Will the Sask Liberal Party rebrand and rebuild as a new free enterprise party?
Thus the next 4 years may prove to be a very interesting and transformative time in Saskatchewan politics, one way or another. In the meantime, the Sask Party is very much in the driver's seat. Whether this is a permanent arrangement or not remains to be seen.
-
The big thing that everyone is asking now that the 2011 has come and gone, is "where do we go from here?" That's a really good question. I might be able to shed some light on that answer, we'll see.
Many Saskatchewan folks now wonder if the Sask Party will win a third term in 2015. Given that the Sask Party increased its seat total from 38 to 49 in this election, a third term is not beyond the pale. But a third term can't be forecast with any certainty until we know a couple of things;
- We have to know what direction the Wall Government will take in its second term - will it be left or right?
- Will Premier Wall continue his war with the unions? Continuing to pick fights with unions in sectors like health care may backfire in time. Also, having labour peace in the province will ultimately be good for our economy.
- Who will the NDP elect as their next leader, and
- Will the Sask Liberal Party rebrand and rebuild as a new free enterprise party?
Thus the next 4 years may prove to be a very interesting and transformative time in Saskatchewan politics, one way or another. In the meantime, the Sask Party is very much in the driver's seat. Whether this is a permanent arrangement or not remains to be seen.
-
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Saskatchewan voter turnout hit 66 percent
It's down a bit from 2007, but its not really a big deal. It could easily be chalked up to the arrival of winter weather on the weekend before the vote. I know that I didn't feel like trudging through the snow to vote this time!
Bater wants to "soldier on"
The Saskatchewan Liberal Leader has no plans to quit after the party's election disaster yesterday. In order to keep his job, he'll need to do a couple of things;
1. Jettison his current advisors,
2. Rebrand the Party by changing its name and its colours to distinguish it from the federal Liberals.
3. Sever all ties with federal Liberals, not just pretending to in name only,
4. This time Bater will have to actually start rebuilding the party. Fortunately he has the visionary document to help him do this called the Declaration of Principles of Prairie Liberalism. The rebuilding will mean going beyond the Battlefords and Saskatoon in search of support.
If all of these things are not done, then the party will remain dead.
1. Jettison his current advisors,
2. Rebrand the Party by changing its name and its colours to distinguish it from the federal Liberals.
3. Sever all ties with federal Liberals, not just pretending to in name only,
4. This time Bater will have to actually start rebuilding the party. Fortunately he has the visionary document to help him do this called the Declaration of Principles of Prairie Liberalism. The rebuilding will mean going beyond the Battlefords and Saskatoon in search of support.
If all of these things are not done, then the party will remain dead.
A Northern Ontario view of Saskatchewan's election outcome
This well-written opinion piece from Northern Ontario clues in on something that I've been talking about privately for a while, but not publicly. Saskatchewan is the new home in Canada of brokerage politics. Premier Wall is showing us how it is done.
2011 Saskatchewan provincial election reaction and analysis: I told you so, Part 2
Wow, what a night! Where to begin? At the beginning, of course.
Saskatchewan Party
Again, I extend my heartiest congratulations to the Saskatchewan Party, on a job well done. They accomplished what they set out to do, and that was the annihilation of their NDP opposition. The Sask Party gained 11 seats for a total of 49. The Sask Party now has more urban seats than does the NDP, including both seats in Moose Jaw and in Prince Albert, 8 out of 12 in Saskatoon, and 8 out of 11 in Regina.
There are two satisfying victories from the night that Premier Wall must be savouring - Regina Douglas Park and The Battlefords. The Sask Party invested a great deal of time and money in ensuring that Dwain Lingenfelter would never have the opportunity to use his dirty bag of political tricks on them. The Sask Party effectively neutralized 'Link' as an opponent by running TV ads against him for the past 2 years. They knew that if they gave Lingenfelter even the smallest opening, that he would be able to exploit it and damage them. In that regard the Sask Party plan was executed perfectly, and as a bonus they knocked Lingenfelter right out of the Legislature. It became obvious that 'Link' was in trouble in his own riding about halfway through the election campaign. At the start of the writ period, Regina South NDP candidate Yens Pedersen had large billboard signs up across his riding, including one on Kramer Boulevard across from the University of Regina. But two weeks ago Saturday, all of those signs were removed and replaced with giant Lingenfelter lawn signs. I took that as a sign that the NDP central campaign had determined that Sask Party candidate Bill Hutchinson was too far ahead in Regina South for Pedersen to catch, and that precious NDP resources were needed more urgently to hold the line where Lingenfelter was running. The victory in The Battlefords destroys the potential for a free enterprise alternative to the Sask Party to occur at any time in the near future.
This is the biggest election win in Saskatchewan history - it even surpasses the great 1912 election win by the Sask Liberals when Premier Walter Scott won almost 57 percent of the vote and 45 of 53 seats in the Legislature. Premier Brad Wall now sits on a mountain on political capital. Not only is he the most popular politician in the province since the days of Tommy Douglas, but he now has a landslide government at his disposal. With over 64 percent of the vote, he has a mandate to do as he pleases.
The big question then becomes, what will Premier Wall do with his landslide government? Will he continue with the strategy of the first term and continue moving to the left, or will he finally use this opportunity to start bringing free enterprise government to our province? Expectations of our Premier are now very high, given the economic boom and the large mandate just awarded to the Saskatchewan Party. My instincts tell me that Premier Wall has from now until the next provincial budget in March 2012 to send the people of this province a clear signal about the future direction of his government, one way or the other. I can't imagine the Premier would sit on all of this capital and not do anything with it.
But in any case, the Sask Party has lots of breathing room. It has no competition for voters on the right (for the time being) and the Wall Government can look forward to a rosy economic picture for the foreseeable future. We should be looking for some of the new MLAs to be added to cabinet. Kevin Doherty and Kevin Phillips, the new MLAs for Regina Northeast and Melfort respectively, seem like sure bets for cabinet positions.
All of the predictions that the NDP would win Meadow Lake were not even close. Even my prediction that Jeremy Harrison would win by 500 to 1000 votes was way off. Harrison clobbered the NDP in his seat by over 1,600 votes. There was also some speculation that Bill Hutchinson was in trouble in Regina South, but I knew that was not the case. Hutchinson ended up growing his margin of victory over NDP candidate Yens Pedersen to 944 votes from 255. Two things fed the explosion of the Sask Party vote from 50% provincewide to over 64% - the high popularity of Premier Wall, and the total collapse of the Sask Liberal Party. I was also told the NDP would hold Regina Northeast, but Kevin Doherty blasted Dwayne Yasinowsky right out of the water.
It has been a great election for the Sask Party. The best part for the Sask Party is that if the Liberals fail to rebuild, and if no other free enterprise party emerges to challenge the Sask Party, then the results of November 7 could be repeated in future provincial elections for the foreseeable future. We could have Sask Party government without end for decades.
Saskatchewan New Democrats
For New Democrats. these election results must be depressing and disheartening. The 'natural governing party' has lost over half of the 20 seats they won in 2007, including their leader Dwain Lingenfelter. 'Link' has resigned in wake of the election results, and soon the attention will shift to electing a new leader for the party. In the past, the Saskatchewan NDP did their best to keep the Liberal and Conservative parties competitive with each other so that they could walk up the middle and win power. But in the past 12 years, the NDP created their own slow motion train wreck instead. The NDP formed a disastrous Coalition Government with the Liberals in 1999. After the Coalition was done, the New Democrats went out of their way to ensure no Liberal MLAs were elected in the 2003 and 2007 elections. Even though the Liberals were positioned on the left for those elections, it was still in the NDP interest to see that at least one Liberal was elected to the Legislature. Instead, many New Democrats I know cheered when the Liberals were shut out in 2003 and 2007. Last night, the chickens came home to roost for the NDP.
To be blunt, New Democrats deserved to watch their party slam into the cinderbrick wall of Saskatchewan politics last night. It would do the NDP good to learn some humility and to reflect on the anger toward their party that washed over half of their MLAs out of office. Hopefully the NDP will learn something useful from this election, instead of becoming more bitter and sanctimonious. Most Saskatchewan people are tired of negativity and mediocrity in our politics. Regardless of how we voted on November 7th, most people want our province's economy to grow and succeed, not fail. The days wallowing in mediocre results for our province are over, and the NDP now have to find a way to operate in this new environment.
The last 12 years have been ones of steady decline for the NDP. They had 42 seats in 1995, 29 in 1999, 30 in 2003, 20 in 2007 and now they are down to 9. One wonders if New Democrats will continue to ignore the generational crisis that is enveloping their party and spurring the gradual decline. This crisis began in 1987 when Roy Romanow was acclaimed as Sask NDP Leader, and the party passed up an opportunity to recruit young people from the 'Baby Bust' generation.
The NDP deserve some credit for waging an issues-based campaign instead of the slimefest they usually conduct. The problem though is that the NDP simply made too many promises, too many expensive promises, and never grasped the marketing end of these promises. The New Democrats would have been better off making fewer promises and putting them into an 'orange book', then promoting the top 2 or 3 items in that orange book.
One encouraging thing for the NDP is that most of their remaining MLAs are young and have something to offer in terms of rebuilding their party. Individuals like Trent Wotherspoon, Warren McCall and Cam Broten are well thought of inside and outside of their party, and they have a lot of talent and skills to offer the people of this province. Perhaps these MLAs will succeed in creating a less arrogant and less sanctimonious NDP. Maybe these MLAs will even manage to modernize their party and move it economically to the centre of the spectrum?
Now that Lingenfelter is gone from the NDP Leadership, New Democrats will have a chance to elect a new leader. This time. the NDP have to show more wisdom in their next choice of leader. Given the disasterous trend in the party's fortunes since 1999, they can't afford another bad choice in leader.
The Greens
Congratulations are in order for Victor Lau and the Green Party of Saskatchewan, the province's new third party. The Greens got over 11,000 votes provincewide, or about 3 percent of the vote. That is an improvement of 66% from the 2 percent they got in 2007. The Greens fielded a full slate of candidates for the first time, and 41 percent of those candidates were women, a provincial record for any party. Lau was thrust into the Green Party leadership on September 6 when Larissa Shasko abruptly quit and went to work on Yens Pedersen's NDP campaign in Regina South. A leadership vote was held on September 25 that reinforced Victor as Leader, but that only gave him and his team 2 weeks to prepare for the dropping of the election writ. But inspite of being behind the eight ball, Lau and his team hammered out a coherent election platform and mobilized a full slate of candidates, most of whom actively campaigned in their local communities. The thing is that if Shasko hadn't quit as Green Leader, its doubtful the Greens would have fielded a full slate of candidates or run the energetic and engaging campaign that they did. Shasko actually did the Greens a favour by resigning.
However, the Greens still have a lot of work to do to be taken more seriously in this province. In order to start climbing in the polls and public consciousness, the Greens are likely going to have to rebrand so they can appeal to a larger portion of the Saskatchewan electorate. A lot of work also needs to be done in terms of recruiting, fundraising and organizing. If the Greens do these things, they could begin to rise as an electoral force in the province. However if the party continues to be treated like a social club, then the Greens will go nowhere. Thus the party is at a crossroads; they had reason to cheer their improved results in this election, but now the Greens are confronted with a challenge and an opportunity at the same time. It will be curious to see if and how the Greens approach this opportunity.
Saskatchewan Liberal Party
The collapse of the Saskatchewan Liberal Party is now complete. The Liberals engaged in a risky and disastrous high-stakes strategy that allowed most of the party to wither and die, and to instead pour all of their resources into The Battlefords constituency where Leader Ryan Bater lives and works.This strategy was never going to work. By deliberately only running 9 candidates, they ensured that there would be minimal media coverage of the party, and that running only a handful of candidates would fuel the perception (and the reality) that the party had not yet hit rock bottom. The fact that the Liberals were hardly in the news from 2007 to 2011 didn't help.
But there are other troubling aspects about the these election results for the Liberals. For all of the talk of pouring all of the party's resources into The Battlefords riding, Bater only managed 12 percent of the vote, or 805 votes. Was any doorknocking done in leadup to this election? It sure doesn't look like it. Then there is the matter of Ralph Goodale and Justin Trudeau. It was always the unwritten rule that no Saskatchewan Liberal Leader should ever campaign or even be seen in public with federal Liberal politicians, yet Bater invited Goodale in to help, and Trudeau was supposed to make an appearance, then ditched at the 11th hour. Bater made a genuine attempt to reposition the Liberals along their traditional right-wing, classical liberal roots in 2009, with new policies and the adoption of the Declaration of Principles of Prairie Liberalism. The provincial Liberal voting base is right-wing, in the libertarian, classical liberal way. But the Declaration just gathered dust and was never promoted or used to recruit new members, and the party still shared the same terrible red and white colours and name as the federal party. These election results confirm what people tried to tell Bater over the past 4 years to no avail, that the Liberal brand is dead in Saskatchewan, deader than a doornail. No serious rebuilding of the party happened after the 2007 election. Instead party members who were not from Saskatoon lost interest when they saw the party wasn't going to recover, and moved on. The nails were really driven into the Liberal coffin in September 2009, when only one of the two by-elections was contested, and no effort was put into winning either seat.
In order for the party to move ahead from now on, the party's name will have to be changed, and a new colour scheme will have to be adopted. Otherwise the party is simply dead. There isn't much of a future for the Saskatchewan Liberal Party in wake of these election results, not unless a serious rebranding is done soon.
I may have more analysis in the days ahead. That's it for now.
Saskatchewan Party
Again, I extend my heartiest congratulations to the Saskatchewan Party, on a job well done. They accomplished what they set out to do, and that was the annihilation of their NDP opposition. The Sask Party gained 11 seats for a total of 49. The Sask Party now has more urban seats than does the NDP, including both seats in Moose Jaw and in Prince Albert, 8 out of 12 in Saskatoon, and 8 out of 11 in Regina.
There are two satisfying victories from the night that Premier Wall must be savouring - Regina Douglas Park and The Battlefords. The Sask Party invested a great deal of time and money in ensuring that Dwain Lingenfelter would never have the opportunity to use his dirty bag of political tricks on them. The Sask Party effectively neutralized 'Link' as an opponent by running TV ads against him for the past 2 years. They knew that if they gave Lingenfelter even the smallest opening, that he would be able to exploit it and damage them. In that regard the Sask Party plan was executed perfectly, and as a bonus they knocked Lingenfelter right out of the Legislature. It became obvious that 'Link' was in trouble in his own riding about halfway through the election campaign. At the start of the writ period, Regina South NDP candidate Yens Pedersen had large billboard signs up across his riding, including one on Kramer Boulevard across from the University of Regina. But two weeks ago Saturday, all of those signs were removed and replaced with giant Lingenfelter lawn signs. I took that as a sign that the NDP central campaign had determined that Sask Party candidate Bill Hutchinson was too far ahead in Regina South for Pedersen to catch, and that precious NDP resources were needed more urgently to hold the line where Lingenfelter was running. The victory in The Battlefords destroys the potential for a free enterprise alternative to the Sask Party to occur at any time in the near future.
This is the biggest election win in Saskatchewan history - it even surpasses the great 1912 election win by the Sask Liberals when Premier Walter Scott won almost 57 percent of the vote and 45 of 53 seats in the Legislature. Premier Brad Wall now sits on a mountain on political capital. Not only is he the most popular politician in the province since the days of Tommy Douglas, but he now has a landslide government at his disposal. With over 64 percent of the vote, he has a mandate to do as he pleases.
The big question then becomes, what will Premier Wall do with his landslide government? Will he continue with the strategy of the first term and continue moving to the left, or will he finally use this opportunity to start bringing free enterprise government to our province? Expectations of our Premier are now very high, given the economic boom and the large mandate just awarded to the Saskatchewan Party. My instincts tell me that Premier Wall has from now until the next provincial budget in March 2012 to send the people of this province a clear signal about the future direction of his government, one way or the other. I can't imagine the Premier would sit on all of this capital and not do anything with it.
But in any case, the Sask Party has lots of breathing room. It has no competition for voters on the right (for the time being) and the Wall Government can look forward to a rosy economic picture for the foreseeable future. We should be looking for some of the new MLAs to be added to cabinet. Kevin Doherty and Kevin Phillips, the new MLAs for Regina Northeast and Melfort respectively, seem like sure bets for cabinet positions.
All of the predictions that the NDP would win Meadow Lake were not even close. Even my prediction that Jeremy Harrison would win by 500 to 1000 votes was way off. Harrison clobbered the NDP in his seat by over 1,600 votes. There was also some speculation that Bill Hutchinson was in trouble in Regina South, but I knew that was not the case. Hutchinson ended up growing his margin of victory over NDP candidate Yens Pedersen to 944 votes from 255. Two things fed the explosion of the Sask Party vote from 50% provincewide to over 64% - the high popularity of Premier Wall, and the total collapse of the Sask Liberal Party. I was also told the NDP would hold Regina Northeast, but Kevin Doherty blasted Dwayne Yasinowsky right out of the water.
It has been a great election for the Sask Party. The best part for the Sask Party is that if the Liberals fail to rebuild, and if no other free enterprise party emerges to challenge the Sask Party, then the results of November 7 could be repeated in future provincial elections for the foreseeable future. We could have Sask Party government without end for decades.
Saskatchewan New Democrats
For New Democrats. these election results must be depressing and disheartening. The 'natural governing party' has lost over half of the 20 seats they won in 2007, including their leader Dwain Lingenfelter. 'Link' has resigned in wake of the election results, and soon the attention will shift to electing a new leader for the party. In the past, the Saskatchewan NDP did their best to keep the Liberal and Conservative parties competitive with each other so that they could walk up the middle and win power. But in the past 12 years, the NDP created their own slow motion train wreck instead. The NDP formed a disastrous Coalition Government with the Liberals in 1999. After the Coalition was done, the New Democrats went out of their way to ensure no Liberal MLAs were elected in the 2003 and 2007 elections. Even though the Liberals were positioned on the left for those elections, it was still in the NDP interest to see that at least one Liberal was elected to the Legislature. Instead, many New Democrats I know cheered when the Liberals were shut out in 2003 and 2007. Last night, the chickens came home to roost for the NDP.
To be blunt, New Democrats deserved to watch their party slam into the cinderbrick wall of Saskatchewan politics last night. It would do the NDP good to learn some humility and to reflect on the anger toward their party that washed over half of their MLAs out of office. Hopefully the NDP will learn something useful from this election, instead of becoming more bitter and sanctimonious. Most Saskatchewan people are tired of negativity and mediocrity in our politics. Regardless of how we voted on November 7th, most people want our province's economy to grow and succeed, not fail. The days wallowing in mediocre results for our province are over, and the NDP now have to find a way to operate in this new environment.
The last 12 years have been ones of steady decline for the NDP. They had 42 seats in 1995, 29 in 1999, 30 in 2003, 20 in 2007 and now they are down to 9. One wonders if New Democrats will continue to ignore the generational crisis that is enveloping their party and spurring the gradual decline. This crisis began in 1987 when Roy Romanow was acclaimed as Sask NDP Leader, and the party passed up an opportunity to recruit young people from the 'Baby Bust' generation.
The NDP deserve some credit for waging an issues-based campaign instead of the slimefest they usually conduct. The problem though is that the NDP simply made too many promises, too many expensive promises, and never grasped the marketing end of these promises. The New Democrats would have been better off making fewer promises and putting them into an 'orange book', then promoting the top 2 or 3 items in that orange book.
One encouraging thing for the NDP is that most of their remaining MLAs are young and have something to offer in terms of rebuilding their party. Individuals like Trent Wotherspoon, Warren McCall and Cam Broten are well thought of inside and outside of their party, and they have a lot of talent and skills to offer the people of this province. Perhaps these MLAs will succeed in creating a less arrogant and less sanctimonious NDP. Maybe these MLAs will even manage to modernize their party and move it economically to the centre of the spectrum?
Now that Lingenfelter is gone from the NDP Leadership, New Democrats will have a chance to elect a new leader. This time. the NDP have to show more wisdom in their next choice of leader. Given the disasterous trend in the party's fortunes since 1999, they can't afford another bad choice in leader.
The Greens
Congratulations are in order for Victor Lau and the Green Party of Saskatchewan, the province's new third party. The Greens got over 11,000 votes provincewide, or about 3 percent of the vote. That is an improvement of 66% from the 2 percent they got in 2007. The Greens fielded a full slate of candidates for the first time, and 41 percent of those candidates were women, a provincial record for any party. Lau was thrust into the Green Party leadership on September 6 when Larissa Shasko abruptly quit and went to work on Yens Pedersen's NDP campaign in Regina South. A leadership vote was held on September 25 that reinforced Victor as Leader, but that only gave him and his team 2 weeks to prepare for the dropping of the election writ. But inspite of being behind the eight ball, Lau and his team hammered out a coherent election platform and mobilized a full slate of candidates, most of whom actively campaigned in their local communities. The thing is that if Shasko hadn't quit as Green Leader, its doubtful the Greens would have fielded a full slate of candidates or run the energetic and engaging campaign that they did. Shasko actually did the Greens a favour by resigning.
However, the Greens still have a lot of work to do to be taken more seriously in this province. In order to start climbing in the polls and public consciousness, the Greens are likely going to have to rebrand so they can appeal to a larger portion of the Saskatchewan electorate. A lot of work also needs to be done in terms of recruiting, fundraising and organizing. If the Greens do these things, they could begin to rise as an electoral force in the province. However if the party continues to be treated like a social club, then the Greens will go nowhere. Thus the party is at a crossroads; they had reason to cheer their improved results in this election, but now the Greens are confronted with a challenge and an opportunity at the same time. It will be curious to see if and how the Greens approach this opportunity.
Saskatchewan Liberal Party
The collapse of the Saskatchewan Liberal Party is now complete. The Liberals engaged in a risky and disastrous high-stakes strategy that allowed most of the party to wither and die, and to instead pour all of their resources into The Battlefords constituency where Leader Ryan Bater lives and works.This strategy was never going to work. By deliberately only running 9 candidates, they ensured that there would be minimal media coverage of the party, and that running only a handful of candidates would fuel the perception (and the reality) that the party had not yet hit rock bottom. The fact that the Liberals were hardly in the news from 2007 to 2011 didn't help.
But there are other troubling aspects about the these election results for the Liberals. For all of the talk of pouring all of the party's resources into The Battlefords riding, Bater only managed 12 percent of the vote, or 805 votes. Was any doorknocking done in leadup to this election? It sure doesn't look like it. Then there is the matter of Ralph Goodale and Justin Trudeau. It was always the unwritten rule that no Saskatchewan Liberal Leader should ever campaign or even be seen in public with federal Liberal politicians, yet Bater invited Goodale in to help, and Trudeau was supposed to make an appearance, then ditched at the 11th hour. Bater made a genuine attempt to reposition the Liberals along their traditional right-wing, classical liberal roots in 2009, with new policies and the adoption of the Declaration of Principles of Prairie Liberalism. The provincial Liberal voting base is right-wing, in the libertarian, classical liberal way. But the Declaration just gathered dust and was never promoted or used to recruit new members, and the party still shared the same terrible red and white colours and name as the federal party. These election results confirm what people tried to tell Bater over the past 4 years to no avail, that the Liberal brand is dead in Saskatchewan, deader than a doornail. No serious rebuilding of the party happened after the 2007 election. Instead party members who were not from Saskatoon lost interest when they saw the party wasn't going to recover, and moved on. The nails were really driven into the Liberal coffin in September 2009, when only one of the two by-elections was contested, and no effort was put into winning either seat.
In order for the party to move ahead from now on, the party's name will have to be changed, and a new colour scheme will have to be adopted. Otherwise the party is simply dead. There isn't much of a future for the Saskatchewan Liberal Party in wake of these election results, not unless a serious rebranding is done soon.
I may have more analysis in the days ahead. That's it for now.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Election night reaction to the results
Well friends, there isn't much about tonight's election results that is very surprising. If you've paid attention to anything that I've been saying for the past 3 and a half years, then you'll know that I predicted the results of thsi evening for a long time now. I predicted that with the demise and disappearance of the Sask Liberal Party, it would create an electoral tsunami that swept away most of the 20 New Democrat MLAs elected in 1997. I may have been a little off on numbers (I predicted zero to 7 for the NDP), but in the greater scheme of things, I turned out to be very close to the high range of that scale.
First of all congratulation to Premier Wall and other 48 members of his caucus - well done. They worked hard for this result, and to the victors go the spoils. Also, congratulations to the 9 New Democrats who managed to find someone solid to lash themselves too when they saw the tsunami coming. To everyone else in all of the parties who were defeated tonight, I hope you can find some comfort in your loss, I mean that.
I'll be back tomorrow with a full analysis of the election results, and the implication of these numbers.
First of all congratulation to Premier Wall and other 48 members of his caucus - well done. They worked hard for this result, and to the victors go the spoils. Also, congratulations to the 9 New Democrats who managed to find someone solid to lash themselves too when they saw the tsunami coming. To everyone else in all of the parties who were defeated tonight, I hope you can find some comfort in your loss, I mean that.
I'll be back tomorrow with a full analysis of the election results, and the implication of these numbers.
Election day is here
The polls are open across Saskatchewan today from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. I'll have final results posted on here, an analysis of the results, followed by a post-mortem.
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