Democracy advocacy group critical of proposal to extend municipal terms

A group that advocates for democracy rejects the provincial government’s justification for considering extending the terms of municipal councils by a year.

The Saskatchewan Party government is gathering feedback on the possibility of moving municipal elections from October 2020 to October 2021 to avoid a conflict with the November 2020 provincial election.

That would extend municipal terms by an entire year from four years to five, which has never happened before in Saskatchewan and is believed to be unprecedented in Canada.

“A bit of possible confusion by some voters between the candidates in a municipal election and the provincial election is not a good enough reason to extend the terms of councillors or provincial politicians by a year,” Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch, wrote in an email.

Conacher also works as a professor of law and politics at the University of Ottawa.

He said he thinks both the provincial and municipal elections should happen as scheduled in 2020.

Any adjustments should be made after election day, given the possibility of a minority government being elected provincially in 2020, Conacher added.

A minority government could result in a change of the date for the following provincial election, he noted.

Saskatchewan’s chief electoral officer, Michael Boda, identified the conflict as a problem in the spring of 2017, citing potential voter confusion and a strain on limited resources. Boda recommended extending the term of the provincial government until the spring of 2021 and then holding the next provincial election in the fall of 2025.

Like the federal government and virtually all provincial counterparts, Saskatchewan has adopted a fixed election law.

Elections are mandated for the first Monday in November four years after the last vote.

Saskatchewan’s law also includes a provision that prevents competing federal and provincial campaigns.

So when the federal election happened in 2015, the provincial election was moved to April 2016. That created the 2020 conflict. Saskatchewan is the only province with a fixed election date in November.

In Alberta, next year’s election can happen on any date between March 1 and May 31.

Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island are scheduled to hold elections next year that would overlap with the federal campaign that ends Oct. 21.

In an interview this week, Boda said he believes it’s not unprecedented to extend a municipal government’s term to avoid an election conflict, but could not provide examples.

“What I’m trying to do is solve this problem in the long run,” Boda said.

The provincial government will make the decision.

Quebec’s provincial government considered moving school board elections scheduled for this fall to 2020 to avoid conflicts with this year’s provincial election and next year’s federal election, but that plan appears to have been shelved.