A TURN TO THE RIGHT
Populism, conservatism rule province
Saskatchewan politics — especially, federal politics — has always been contrarian in nature.
But at some point in the past few decades, voters in this province went from being against whatever government is running the country to a decidedly more conservative contrarian view.
Precisely when that happened seems a matter of debate.
Former politician Ron Osika suggests it might have been 1997, when the Saskatchewan Party was formed — an event that sent a strong message to all voters that the politics in this province now boiled down to a choice between one conservative option and an alternative.
“In 1997, everything took a turn to the right,” said the now 80-yearold Osika, a one-time federal Reform Party candidate who wound up getting elected as a Liberal MLA and then serving as a provincial minister in the Liberal-ndp coalition before unsuccessfully running as a New Democrat in 2003.
As a populist, homegrown party, the Sask. Party afforded voters the ability to express a right-of-centre viewpoint that was removed from whatever past baggage had been accumulated by the provincial and national wings of its party.
Perhaps this desire was not surprising. There has always been something about this prairie, agrarian place that nurtures a need to start over with something new and different.
At times, it’s been expressed in the radical-for-its-day notion of the first elected social democratic government in North America. Mostly, though, it’s been a need to send a loud message to national government 2,600 kilometres away that voters here are unhappy and want to be heard.
In 32 federal elections held since Saskatchewan entered Confederation in 1905, on only 14 occasions did the majority of Saskatchewan MPS sit on the government side of the House of Commons.
Is there something in (today’s) technology that lends itself more to right-wing populism than left-wing populism? I’m not sure.
Half of those 14 occasions occurred in the first 45 years of Saskatchewan’s existence, when the new province seemed somewhat content electing provincial Liberal governments and sending Liberal MPS to Ottawa. As it stands right now, it’s been 70 years since Saskatchewan elected a majority of Liberal MPS to sit in a majority federal Liberal government.
By contrast, there have been seven occasions when the majority of Saskatchewan MPS sat in a conservative majority or minority government. It happened twice with John Diefenbaker majority/minority governments (1958 and 1962), once with Joe Clark’s minority government (1979), once with Brian Mulroney’s government (1984) and, most recently, three times with Stephen Harper’s minority and majority governments (2006, 2008 and 2011).
Liberal Ralph Goodale — the longest serving Saskatchewan MP and only recent Liberal who can boast of long-term success in this province — says the province’s federal voting history can be broken down into three phases.
The early political history of Saskatchewan was dominated by Liberals both federal and provincially, Goodale agreed.
Then along came the Dirty ’30s, which solidified that defiant need to be heard — what gave rise to the Tommy Douglas Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. While the CCF/NDP has governed Saskatchewan for 47 years since the Second World War, it hasn’t been as successful federally. (Only on five occasions — 1945, 1953, 1957, 1980 and 1988 — were the most Saskatchewan MPS elected CCF/NDP.)
Nevertheless, Goodale noted the election of CCF-NDP MPS and the more frequent postwar selection of conservative MPS to oppose federal Liberal governments was an expression of the Saskatchewan prairie defiance.
“There has a always been a bit of a ‘us’ against ‘them,’ ” he noted.
Eventually, that outsider attitude shifted from the left-wing populism of Douglas and the CCF/NDP to the right-wing populism that started with Prince Albert-based Diefenbaker that’s now expressed in what Goodale sees as the third phase: the successes of modern-day conservatism in Saskatchewan.
Changing demographics, the difference between urban and rural voters and the reality that the “pendulum always swings back” in politics makes generalizations about today’s voters, said the Liberal MP who was first elected in 1974 and who has served continuously since 1993.
But he admits that there has been a decidedly populist right-wing slant to Saskatchewan politics in the past 20 years in which his conservative rivals have been able to use things like social media to maintain a solid base in their criticism of issues like carbon pricing.
“Is there something in (today’s) technology that lends itself more to right-wing populism than leftwing populism? I’m not sure,” Goodale said.
If it’s strictly a question of when Saskatchewan consistently elected more federal conservative MPS than MPS from other parties, there’s a good case for Osika’s suggestion it was 1997.
Since 1997, the right-wing alternative party (the Reform Party, Canadian Alliance and now the Conservative Party of Canada that emerged as result of the merger of the two right-of-centre parties) has always elected the majority of MPS in Saskatchewan seats. In fact, the conservative alternative has won 78.6 per cent of the time in Saskatchewan during the past two decades.
Osika — who would wind up as runner-up to Garry Breitkreuz in a 1993 Reform Party nomination contest — said it was likely easier for politicians like himself to move from party to party. Today’s Saskatchewan voters seem more entrenched in their parties’ philosophies. But Osika noted that federal Saskatchewan MPS often become entrenched in their riding and suspects he might also have become a long-serving conservative MP like Breitkreuz did as Yorkton-melville MP representing the Reform, Canadian Alliance and Conservative parties.
Breitkreuz’s own long career began in 1993 by knocking off the NDP’S Lorne Nystrom’s 25-year run in what many consider a watershed moment in Saskatchewan politics, when voters transitioned from being simply contrarian to favouring conservative politicians both federally and provincially.
“The northeast of the province was ‘red square,’ ” Osika said of the area’s penchant to elect Nystrom and NDP MLAS. “Its demise began in the mid-1990s.”
University of Regina political science professor Jim Farney agrees that it was about this time that Prairie populism was rebranded with a more conservative slant.
“1993 was likely it, because it was about how we could vote against the establishment,” Farney said.
Long before it became fashionable elsewhere, Saskatchewan politics has always demonstrated healthy distaste for what is now is often described as “Eastern Canada Elites” or the “Laurentian Establishment,” Farney noted.
Demands to freely market Saskatchewan commodities and an abhorrence of big government and big political spending played a significant role in the development of Saskatchewan’s political attitude. There was little tolerance for even conservative governments voters felt were favouring Eastern Canada.
Back in 1993, conservative-minded voters were frustrated with the big deficits of both the provincial Progressive Conservative government of Grant Devine and the federal PC government of Mulroney, which were regarded as an affront to Saskatchewan’s prudent sensibilities.
Interestingly, 1993 also happened to be last the year in which Saskatchewan did not elect a majority of conservative-minded federal MPS. That year, the province sent five Liberals, four New Democrats and five Reform Party candidates to Ottawa.
And in the previous election in 1988, when Mulroney’s large majority was still strong, Saskatchewan sent 10 New Democrats and four PCS to Ottawa.
It was the last great act of Saskatchewan’s purely contrarian nature that suggested even when the federal government seems to be acting in the province’s best interests, it can still run into its voters’ wrath.
Just two years earlier in 1986, Mulroney had provided a billion-dollar payout to farmers at the request of Devine in the middle of that year’s provincial election campaign. In fact, the call was overheard through the thin walls of Kelvington’s Sportsman Inn by then Starphoenix reporter Earl Fowler, who was in the next room covering the provincial campaign.
Moreover, 1988 was known as the Canada-u.s. free-trade election — a policy that would prove popular in Saskatchewan, which has long been reliant on the movement of its raw commodities.
Yet Saskatchewan voters were still intent on sending a loud message to the governing conservative prime minister by electing 10 Saskatchewan NDP MPS to oppose Mulroney’s government.
Farney noted there were other national issues of Mulroney’s perceived favouritism toward Eastern Canada — specifically, Quebec — that angered Western voters.
Next door in Manitoba, Winnipeg’s Bristol Aerospace lost a 20year, $100-million CF-18 contract to Montreal-based Canadair — an issue that had then Manitoba NDP Premier Howard Pawley accusing Mulroney of lying to him.
It was precisely the kind of issue that broke Saskatchewan’s trust in the old-line parties, giving rise to Western populism and new Western-based movements more inclined to represent a Saskatchewan viewpoint, Farney noted.
In those pivotal 1993 election results, Saskatchewan voters rejected both the Mulroney Progressive Conservatives (as they had done two years earlier when they ousted the Devine Tories provincially) and the Liberal wave under Jean Chretien, embracing a new brand of conservatism in the Reform Party.
“Saskatchewan has always been conservative, in large measure,” said Dale Eisler, former political columnist for the Regina Leader-post and Saskatoon Starphoenix and now a senior policy fellow at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy and senior adviser on government relations to University of Regina President Vianne Timmons.
Eisler says the pivotal moment likely goes back 37 years to April 26, 1982, when Devine was elected on a populist wave — a critical time because it was when the provincial conservative political outlook was firmly established. “In that election, a sense of a new rural Saskatchewan was beginning to emerge.”
Then NDP premier Allan Blakeney fought the 1982 campaign on keeping the Crowsnest Rate that subsidized farmers’ grain transportation costs — an issue that didn’t take seed in an already changing rural Saskatchewan that was demanding more freedom in marketing commodities.
“The NDP were left in the dark in rural Saskatchewan and (both federally and provincially) have pretty much remained there since,” Eisler observed.
Under the Blakeney NDP government 40 years ago, farmers complained bitterly about being taxed on their dual-axle trucks; the NDP saw it as part of the trend toward larger farming operations, which was not aligned with its vision of the family farm. Today, more than half of the semi-truck trailers registered in Saskatchewan belong to farmers.
It wouldn’t be an easy economic or political transition and Eisler acknowledges that political events like the CF-18 contract (federally) and overspending (provincially and federally) severely altered the conservative moment in this province.
Only when both the federal and provincial parties were rebranded under the Sask. Party leadership of Brad Wall and the new Conservative Party of Canada under Stephen Harper was the transformation completed.
That both Wall and Harper governed during a strong period of economic growth in Saskatchewan only strengthened the naturally deep conservative roots in this province, Eisler said.
Especially key was the support of both Wall and Harper for the oil sector that emerged in the last decade and a half as Saskatchewan’s economic driver.
This now puts current Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer in good stead for the Oct. 21 federal election, which will undoubtedly see political debate centre around the carbon tax and feelings that the Eastern Liberals are alienated from Saskatchewan’s economic realities.
Since the emergence of Harper’s new Conservatives, candidates from the party have won a whopping 87.1 per cent of the time; the current 10 of 14 seats after the 2015 election are its least successful performance.
Most anticipate Scheer will gain seats in Saskatchewan for a series of reasons, including the unpopularity of both federal Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.
The Regina-qu’appelle MP is the second straight Conservative leader from the west, following other conservative party leaders like Preston Manning of the Reform Party and Stockwell Day of the Canadian Alliance.
It’s also been arguably helpful that conservatives have only governed federally for nine years in the past quarter century. In only four of those years were they governing as a majority.
That surely enhances the naturally conservative, contrarian nature that’s dictated Saskatchewan’s federal voting patterns for such a long time.
The NDP were left in the dark in rural Saskatchewan and (both federally and provincially) have pretty much remained there since.