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.
8 comments:
Very, very good analysis. Noting the time mark of 4:13 AM, you have either had a late end to your election day or a very early start to the morning after.
I thoroughly enjoyed your post election comments. Insightful and heartfelt. A tip of the hat to you John. Thanks!
Jim Fodey
Regina
Hi Jim - thank you, its been a long time. Do you have any additional comments on the election outcome? Who do you think will be the next leader of the Saskatchewan New Democrats?
I enjoyed your series of constituency profiles. They were well done with interesting observations. A real service for political junkies. Thank you.
Sask New Dems are now dealing with 2 leadership vacancies: Federal and provincial. The federal leadership campaign is interesting enough and now we have two on the go!
I believe that it is the NDP's provincial council who make the decision on timing of a leadership race. I have no inkling of when they will decide to call it. Clearly, the caucus needs an interim caucus leader who also assumes the role of acting Leader of the Official Opposition. I would think an interim leader must be someone who has no intention of seeking Party leadership. If he is not going to throw his hat in the ring for leader, then John Nilson is the longest serving member of the opposition and as a lawyer he is well positioned to oversee scrutiny and debate of Government Bills. However, Nilson may well seek the leadership and I think the next longest serving member may be David Forbes.
As for someone coming from the outside to seek the leadership, that is possible. The only names that come to mind quickly are Andrew Thompson or Noah Evanchuk. Otherwise, the main leadership contenders will likely come from the Caucus ... Wotherspoon, Broten, McCall, Belanger, Chartier are all possible names.
Clearly there is a move in the New Democratic party (both federally and provincially) for an orderly intergenerational transfer of power and leadership. As long as intergenerational dialogue continues the transfers will be smooth.
Hope you are well.
Hi Jim,things are fine with me; I keep busy with a number of small projects.
I have followed the federal NDP leadership race somewhat - I will probably post more about it as Saskatchewan New Democrats publicly endorse candidates. Romanow's endorsement of Topp caught me off guard.
I'll be interested to see who runs in the provincial NDP leadership race. I'm not an insider of course, but I would be shocked if Cam Broten and Trent Wotherspoon didn't run and become two of the main candidates. I'm sure Yens Pedersen would like to run again as well. He impressed a lot of people last time by making a strong showing without any endorsements.
Interim leader...the name I am hearing in my troubles is Nilson, but it could also easily be David Forbes. Both are qualified for the job.
The intergenerational transfer of power is underway in all of the parties now. Once it happens in the Sask NDP, the transfer will be complete across the political spectrum.
Once the dust settles from the provincial election, I'm planning to post something on the future of Medicare. I'm not proposing any changes to the system, just identifying some trends like costs, and the implication of those trends to our politicians. I think the future of Medicare and pensions will become the biggest political issues in this decade.
Your Medicare analysis sounds interesting. Looking forward to your observations. Here's the link to a blog themed on the 50th anniversary of Medicare here in Saskatchewan. Not sure if you've seen it.
Thanks Jim, I hadn't seen that about the 50th anniversary of Medicare. All I will say for now, is that we all want Medicare there for us when we need it. I'm deeply concerned about demographic trends that will cause health care costs to grow astronomically over the next two decades. This will happen regardless of which party is in government in Regina, same in Ottawa. It is in this context that I want to open a broad discussion on Medicare.
I think your correct with your assumptions that costs are going to increase and a large population demographic will be in their senior years.
I think that governments and the medical profession need to start thinking beyond the 'reactive' medicare apporach (wait until they're sick and they try to cure them), into preventive measures, programs and initiates to keep our seniors healthy as long as possible.
Not just our aging population, there are many serious health problems with youth as well due to lack of knowledge on nutrition and healthy lifestyle.
There is an epidemic of diabetes in Canada right now and most of it is due to bad nutrition and unhealthy lifestyle. Drinking large amounts of sugar infused soft drinks is the daily lifestyle of many.
We let people get sick due to bad choices and do nothing to educate them. Part of the problem is that if you correlate unhealthy eating/drinking choices with bad health, the corporate entities who make their business from selling these commodities don't react well.
We could surely bring some of the costs of the 'reactive' medicare model down if we could help our citizens stay healthy.
POSTSCRIPT:
Just a brief further comment. If you look at the health damage done by products from the Tobacco Industry for decades, pro-active action has now greatly reduced the number of smoking related health problems. Even though we knew back in the 1970's that smoking caused cancer and other health problems, it was difficult to counter the corporate needs and interests of the tobacco farmers, cigarette manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, etc. Business needs superseded health needs until just recently.
Here are a couple of other current situations where 'corporate' needs take precedent over 'health needs' of the citizenry:
-Infant-formula claims allowed despite 'no acceptable evidence' - CFIA says it's unable to prove Enfamil's 'A+' assertion of superiority
-Nutrition labeling coalition commends USDA for delaying rule
The issue of where priorities will go (Corporate priorities VS Health Concerns) surely must come into any debate on the future of public healthcare ... Medicare.
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