THE FALL OF SASK. LIBERALS
How once powerful party imploded
Three hundred and fifty five votes.
Of almost 450,000 ballots cast in the 2020 provincial election, that's how many went to a party that used to dominate Saskatchewan politics.
The Saskatchewan Liberal Party built the province. It won majority governments in eight of Saskatchewan's first nine elections. Six Liberal leaders became premier.
Ross Thatcher was the last, winning 46 per cent of the vote in 1967. Half a century later, the Liberals won 0.08 per cent. They ran just three candidates in 2020. Their leader, Robert Rudachyk, was almost invisible.
Rudachyk now aims to rebuild. He blamed his predecessor for the catastrophe. “I was left with a party that was basically on life support,” he said. “I tried to keep it alive.”
But others think the Liberals are already dead.
“It's done,” said Darrin Lamoureux, who led the party in the 2016 election. “In its present form, it can't exist.”
How did it happen? Past party leaders tell a story marked by repeated infighting and empty bank accounts, as they struggled against the taint of their unpopular federal cousins and a left-right split that squeezed them into oblivion.
As time went on, defeat became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Parties like the Liberals are designed to win. If they don't, they're pointless.
“Parties that cannot do that in our current system of first-pastthe-post become irrelevant,” said David Karwacki, leader in the 2003 and 2007 elections.
“It's hard to keep people motivated when you're not winning — people want to be with the winner.”
'DESTINED TO OBLIVION'
The agonies of the Saskatchewan Liberal Party were long. It spent the '80s in the political wilderness, foreshadowing harder times ahead. But the Progressive Conservatives collapsed under the weight of mismanagement and scandal. For the Liberals, the future again looked bright.
In 1995, Leader Lynda Haverstock took the Liberals from a single seat to 11. It was enough to restore them to the Official Opposition.
But some expected more. “There was disappointment in the results and some of the elected caucus and a significant number of party members blamed the leader,” Jim Melenchuk, leader from 1996 to 2001, wrote in an email exchange with the Leader-post.
“The majority of caucus carried the day and after the very messy party convention immediately after the election there was outright revolt by the caucus and the leader resigned.”
Melenchuk inherited those divisions when he became leader. He soon noticed that some of his MLAS were “getting cozy” with the Progressive Conservatives. They found the idea of a new party without any baggage “alluring,” he recalls.
The fatal blow that killed the Liberals can be dated exactly. It came on Aug. 8, 1997, when four Liberals bolted to form the Saskatchewan Party with four PC MLAS. For Melenchuk, it was a “death knell” that turned his party into the walking wounded.
“The Saskatchewan Liberal Party was destined to oblivion as soon as the Saskatchewan Party was formed,” he said.
Their departure left the party “decimated,” a rump of loyalists and left-leaning members who no longer formed the Official Opposition. And the bleeding didn't stop, as the party shed members left and right in the lead-up to the 1999 election.
Melenchuk saw a glimmer of hope when his candidate placed second in a 1998 byelection. But the results of the general election were disappointing. Despite winning 21 per cent, the vote splits kept the Liberals to three seats.
The future belonged to the Saskatchewan Party, which proved its strength in rural regions that would form its permanent base and springboard to power.
'WE JUST DIDN'T NEED TO BE LAPDOGS'
But the present offered an opportunity. The Saskatchewan Party's strong performance left the NDP just short of a majority. The Liberals could hold the balance of power.
Melenchuk saw a chance to use a coalition agreement with Roy Romanow's NDP to enact Liberal values and policies.
“We always thought that our performance in government could be a lever to point to in improving Liberal fortunes,” he said.
It didn't. Already damaged, the Liberals lost something they couldn't afford to lose: their identity.
“The idea of using the Liberal successes in the coalition grew dimmer with every passing month as we became more entwined with the pragmatic and centrist approach adopted by the Romanow-led NDP as influenced by the Liberal members,” said Melenchuk.
The coalition sparked a backlash. Melenchuk was removed as leader. When Karwacki took over, he ordered his MLAS to end the deal. They refused.
Karwacki said he took over a party in shambles. He called the coalition a “critical mistake.”
“My perspective was that the Liberal party really needs to have an independent voice,” Karwacki said. “We just didn't need to be lapdogs, if you will, to the NDP.”
'DON'T SPLIT THE VOTE'
Karwacki didn't see the NDP as an ally, but as a target. He saw a tired party in the midst of decay. He thought his Liberals could replace the NDP as the party of the left.
“We miscalculated,” he now admits.
The Saskatchewan Liberal Party was destined to oblivion as soon as the Saskatchewan Party was formed.
JIM MELENCHUK
Karwacki believes Saskatchewan people are centrists on economic issues. That's where he is too. The Liberal party was strong when it held that territory. It kept power for decades by riding the agrarian movement in the early 20th century, looking after the economic interests of the farming economy.
But trouble came when a new kind of social polarization took hold. Federal ties made rural Saskatchewan inhospitable for the Liberals, Karwacki believes, as Ottawa took strong positions on “hot-button issues.”
“On the doorstep, Liberals — it didn't matter whether you're a provincial Liberal or a federal Liberal — you got the crap kicked out of you on gun control, and then same thing with gay marriage,” he said.
“Rural Canada is really not in line with that thinking ... I think that really led to the demise.”
Hence the shift to the left. But the results proved Karwacki wrong. The party dropped from 20 per cent of the vote to 14 per cent in 2003.
Failing to win his own seat was tough to swallow.
“That was certainly a big blow,” he said. “Had we won that one seat, history may have proven out differently.”
Karwacki felt the party “really needed to make a breakthrough” in 2007. But he faced an “ossified” electorate that wasn't open to a third party. The NDP proved stronger than he thought, and he found himself “sandwiched” between it and the Saskatchewan Party.
“Don't split the vote, that was their rallying cry,” he said.
“Either you hated the Saskatchewan Party, or you hated the NDP,” Karwacki explained. “We were sitting there as Liberals, in the middle, trying to eke out a few seats.”
THE TERMINAL PHASE
Karwacki didn't eke out any seats. But he still won nine per cent of the vote. If that was bad, the first post-karwacki election was catastrophic for the Liberals.
Ryan Bater, who led the party to a 0.5 per cent showing in 2011, didn't make himself available for an interview. But Melenchuk and Karwacki have their own ideas of what drove the party deeper into decline.
Melenchuk calls his successors “courageous” for even trying.
“They had lost most of their major financial backers, numerous former candidates, numerous former provincial and executive party members as well as provincial organizers and also most of the grassroots constituency organizers to the Saskatchewan Party,” he noted.
Karwacki was able to fund the party, in part, out of his own pocket. “Funding a third party political movement is difficult, unless you're well heeled,” he said.
He was able to rely on a network of personal contacts. He couldn't match the money flowing into NDP and Saskatchewan Party coffers, but his donations and connections earned $601,510 for the Liberals in 2007.
“We were forced as a political party, the Liberal Party, to be fairly leader-centric through my tenure, and that's a dangerous way to build an organization because when the leader leaves, the organization also leaves,” he said.
The money left too. The Liberals reported just $80,297 in contributions in the year of the 2011 election.
Given those challenges, it's little surprise the party tried to focus its energies. It nominated just nine candidates. Bater targeted his own seat in the Battlefords.
Karwacki views that “individual riding strategy” as a mistake.
“Running a limited number of candidates is just a loser,” he said. “You need to be in the full game.
“People just say, well, you're not really going to form a government so why should I vote for you?”
But he knows the odds were stacked against his successors, whatever they did.
“The folks that took over after me did the best they could,” Karwacki said. “I would say that it shows how fragile political parties are.”
'I'VE GOT TO GET BACK TO ... A REAL JOB'
Lamoureux learned those lessons when he took over in 2013. He ran a full slate of candidates, partly in the hopes that it would win him a place in the 2016 leaders' debate.
He never got an invite. “It really is an uphill battle,” said Lamoureux.
But he did make progress. His 61-riding strategy edged the party back up to 3.6 per cent of the provincewide vote. He earned nearly 11 per cent of the vote in his own riding.
Lamoureux didn't have a lot of money to spend, nor did he try hard to find much of it. He saw the party's lifeblood in its volunteers. He tried to nurture their links to the party.
“Volunteers have got to be connected every day, 365 days a year, every year to be a true volunteer,” he said. “If you're not doing that, you can't expect them to come.”
Lamoureux took one more stab at breaking through in 2018. He ran in the Saskatoon Meewasin byelection that year. But just like Karwacki before him, he was squeezed out in a two-party race.
Left leaning voters told him, “We want to send a message to (Brad) Wall,” he recalls. “We just want our vote to count this time.” They weren't alone. He saw the mirror image coming from the centre right. “We don't want to split the vote, that's all they kept telling me,” said Lamoureux.
Saskatoon Meewasin elected Ryan Meili, now the NDP leader. Lamoureux ended up with 3.6 per cent. He was through.
“I didn't have the energy,” he said. “I decided that I've got to get back to work, a real job, making real money.”
Lamoureux was sorry to watch what happened in the years that followed. In his view, the organization he built frayed in the run-up to the 2020 collapse.
“That's the part that bothers me the most about this election was the volunteers and all the time they gave us,” he said of this year's result.
“It's something to this day I feel bad about, because they were wonderful.”
'IT'S HARD TO BE A LEADER OF A FRINGE PARTY'
The years from 2018 to 2020 are full of recriminations that bring the battles of the 1990s to mind, even if the stakes were lower in a party with little chance at power.
Naveed Anwar, a tax consultant, took over as leader in 2018. Infighting again consumed the Liberals. In Anwar's telling, he built up the party, increasing its membership from 90 to around 800 and boosting party revenues from “hundreds” to “thousands.”
But some blame him for the disaster that followed. Lamoureux said he feels Anwar sabotaged the party when he resigned two weeks before the 2020 election campaign began with only two nominated candidates. Rudachyk feels like he was left in an impossible situation
“Our party was left leaderless, suddenly, without warning, and then I was made the interim leader just a day before the writ dropped,” Rudachyk said. “It left me with no opportunity to really build a team or to organize a campaign.”
Anwar said there's a simple explanation for why he wasn't able to get more candidates in place. The executive committee, which Rudachyk sat on, rejected them.
“It was decided that they're going to go for 25 candidates. Then I forwarded a few names and they refused to take those names. That's why I resigned,” he said.
“I refused to represent the party, where the leader has no say.”
Rudachyk said there were good reasons for rejecting those candidates, though he wouldn't provide them. “Neither of them were suitable as candidates,” he said. According to Anwar, one was turned down because a person with a similar name had donated to the Saskatchewan Party, while the other was deemed “too outspoken.”
But Rudachyk argued that Anwar's mismanagement went beyond candidate recruitment.
“We had a lack of candidates, we have very little money in the bank, because he did no fundraising during that whole two years,” he added. “We actually lost donors, because some of them gave up on the party because nothing was happening.”
Lamoureux feels the same way. “It's hard to be a leader of a fringe party, because at the end of the day, the leader really has to do a lot of the work that the two mainstream parties take for granted,” he said. “I don't feel that Naveed wanted to put the effort in that was required to run a full slate of candidates.”
But little happened in the weeks to follow. Rudachyk said he opted against naming “paper candidates,” and the roster remained at three. Though he appeared on television and did newspaper interviews, he never held any public events.
“It wasn't safe to be out during the campaign due to COVID,” Rudachyk explained. “I made the decision that we were going to be running an exclusive, or almost exclusively online campaign.”
The party spent less than $900 on Facebook ads during the campaign.
A RESURRECTION?
If the Liberal party is dead, can it be resurrected? Is there a leader out there ready to transform its corpse into something new, without the baggage of the Liberal brand and the weight of decades of failure?
Rudachyk said the possibility of rebranding under a different name will be up for discussion at next year's annual general meeting, where he plans to run to stay on as permanent leader. “Those options are on the table,” he said.
Lamoureux said he'll want to be part of any attempt to form a centrist alternative that can tap into a mounting desire for change. A poll during the campaign showed that a sizable chunk of voters want another option.
But Lamoureux thinks the Liberal Party brand, and the association voters make with the federal Liberals, is a “huge” challenge.
“The Liberal brand is just not popular in Saskatchewan,” he said. Melenchuk feels the same way. “The federal Liberal brand in Saskatchewan was a millstone around the neck of provincial Liberals and their leaders,” Melenchuk said.
Karwacki thinks Saskatchewan is “ripe for an alternative.” He sees an opening for a party that can bring together socially progressive and fiscally responsible people, attracting women, men, Aboriginals and new Canadians. It will take “some cachet and some mojo and some excitement.”
“Who can do that?” he asked. “That is the challenge.”
The federal Liberal brand in Saskatchewan was a millstone around the neck of provincial Liberals and their leaders.
JIM MELENCHUK