Throne speech plays second fiddle to feud with Ottawa

Political scientists are expecting few bold moves from the Saskatchewan Party during a legislative session they predict will be overshadowed by federal-provincial disputes and postelection drama in Ottawa.

Wednesday ’s throne speech will kick off the last fall sitting before the 2020 provincial election. It will be among the last opportunities for the government to pad out its legislative agenda before a spring budget, and a vital forum for the NDP to lay out its vision for the Saskatchewan’s future.

Joe Garcea, a political scientist at the University of Saskatchewan, predicted that voters will be paying more attention to the fight between Regina and Ottawa than the day-to-day melee of question period.

“The smaller stuff within the legislature itself is not likely to get a lot of profile,” he said.

He anticipates the government will focus on tweaks in areas like health care, education, municipal governance and perhaps better support for farmers. But he doubts the session will see anything “radical.”

Jim Farney, head of the politics and international studies department at the University of Regina, expected “a housekeeping legislative session.”

In his view, that kind of stay-thecourse strategy has worked for the Saskatchewan Party before. He sees no sign that Scott Moe — now in office for 18 months — is planning to tamper with it. And it’s not even clear where the government would go next if it decided to change direction.

“The longer that you’re in office, the harder it is to come up with big new programs,” Farney said.

With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in power, Farney expects Moe to keep up his fight with the feds. The carbon tax reference remains before the courts, and fiery comments about western alienation on Tuesday suggest the premier wants to turn up to volume.

In Farney’s estimation, it could be a way to drown out bad fiscal news as crop insurance payment risk is putting a dent in a tight surplus.

“This is kind of an easy calculation for them,” he said. “Especially as we watch harvest drag on and yield drop, getting to balance next spring might be something you don’t want to make much noise about.”

Moe did not address his plans for the throne speech during a Tuesday news conference. There have been signals from his government that some legislative changes could be coming, notably to tighten lobbying rules.

But NDP Leader Ryan Meili was more forthright on Tuesday, laying down the Opposition’s priorities for holding the government to account.

He revealed plans to focus on health care and education. That suggests little change from the spring session, when Meili and his team hammered away on class sizes. But Meili also mentioned the government’s recent decision to replace a popular program promoting rooftop solar panels with a less generous alternative, signalling that it could be a target for the Opposition as session gets underway.

Meili framed it in economic — not environmental — terms, zeroing in on warnings that the shift could kill the province’s solar industry and cost jobs.

For Farney, it’s exactly that kind of “bread and butter” framing that the NDP needs to develop. But he thinks the party will have to work hard to appeal to voters beyond its base in the run-up to 2020.

Garcea said the NDP needs to find a unifying message that links its disparate criticisms of the government.

“Right now they’ve got too many small messages,” he said. “They haven’t found, I think, a way to cohere those into a major theme, a major vision. I don’t think (voters) able to see a cohesive vision. So I think that’s a challenge for them.”

Above all, he thinks the party needs to be patient and avoid criticizing for the sake of criticizing. More often than not, governments defeat themselves. For Garcea, the NDP’S task is to build itself up as a credible government in waiting.

“Get ready for the time when there’s a mood for change,” he advised.

Farney expects suburban Regina and Saskatoon will become electoral battlegrounds in 2020. As a short-term strategy, he said the NDP should focus on issues like health care and infrastructure that have traction there. The Saskatchewan Party will have to do likewise to hold onto those seats, and avoid turning a weak opposition into a strong one.

But that alone won’t be enough to change the tide. Farney sees a long game as well, centred on making inroads in immigrant and Indigenous communities.

He wonders whether the parties will be far-sighted enough to glimpse it this session.

“I don’t think you’ll be able to be a Saskatchewan government in 2025 or 2030 without those two groups being behind you,” Farney said. “What’s going to happen in this legislative session to pull them in? I doubt very much, to be honest.”