Moe confident of winning duel against Meili

As much as Monday’s 2020-21 budget would seem unhelpful to the Saskatchewan Party’s electoral fortunes, it doesn’t seem that they view it as all that harmful.

More than anything, what Finance Minister Donna Harpauer’s budget, with its massive $2.4-billion deficit, told us is the Sask. Party is quite confident that even a pandemic won’t do much to alter the outcome of the Oct. 26 vote.

Considering the recent Angus Reid poll showing the Sask. Party with a 25-percentage-point lead over Ryan Meili’s NDP, there seems little reason to doubt this theory.

This may seem a little puzzling given Harpauer’s rather disjointed financial plan that offered neither path to recovery through more sacrifices nor any meaningful immediate help.

Sure, there is public sympathy for the situation that Harpauer, Premier Scott Moe, et al. find themselves in, but that takes any government only so far. Ultimately, it’s always about what government does. Bad times make it tough for governments to do good things — the time-honoured theory that governments aren’t defeated, but defeat themselves.

Yet there’s an overwhelming sense right now that politics here isn’t about what happened Monday, or what happened March 18, when the Sask. Party government unveiled its spending agenda, or March 12, when Saskatchewan saw its first COVID-19 case. Frankly, it wasn’t even Jan. 27, 2018, when Moe was selected as Sask. Party leader and premier designate.

Really, it appears the key date was March 2, 2018, when Meili was selected as the NDP leader.

Notwithstanding that voters likely know this wasn’t a forthright budget or that the worst will come after the election, they just can’t seriously consider a Meili-led NDP government. Moe and

Voters ... just can’t seriously consider a Meili-led NDP government.

Meili are the two hunters chased by a bear. For Moe, it doesn’t matter that he can’t outrun the bear. He knows he can outrun Meili.

Monday’s budget read like it was all about checking the boxes (budget presented, stakeholders still getting their money: check) than any serious consideration of problems — either for the future or the here and now. The only sense of urgency seems to be getting away from the legislature as soon as possible.

Beyond locked-out Unifor Local 594 members and other union members now encircling the building, one gets why the government doesn’t want to be there.

The legislature is where numbers are discussed and the numbers are historically bad. That $2.4-billion deficit is the largest we’ve ever seen, including Grant Devine’s Progressive Conservative government budgets of the 1980s (although in proportion to the size of the Saskatchewan economy, the 1986-87 deficit was actually bigger).

Given the Sask. Party lineage from PC roots, one might think it would be especially sensitive to this deficit number … and other arguably more damning numbers like the loss of 13,800 jobs in 2020, suggested by Finance Ministry officials Monday. You may recall Moe’s bold plan for 100,000 new jobs by 2030.

Less so than the bad finances (or even the corruption/caucus spending fraud scandal that came out after the PCS left office), it was job and population loss that spelled the Devine government’s demise. We are teetering on that scenario — a situation, one would think, that would be ripe for the opposition.

But the NDP’S problem is Meili has shown little to suggest that he can capitalize on those numbers by selling them to voters.

Meili is likable and rather personable, but to be a successful retail politician requires an ability to present a strong alternative plan that mobilizes a large number of voters. The polls show Meili hasn’t moved anybody beyond his own dwindling NDP base. In short, it doesn’t seem many think he has any better ideas than the questionable ones we saw from Harpauer on Monday.

At least that seems to be how Moe and the Sask. Party see it.

Mandryk is the political columnist the Regina Leader-post and Saskatoon Starphoenix.