Moe may be listening to too many angry, divisive backbenchers

That it’s occasionally the tail wagging the dog is not always the worst thing in governance.

Government often sees excessive power concentrated in a premier’s office that’s surrounded by senior political operatives and civil servants, and distanced from backbenchers who should be most in-tune with voters’ concerns.

This vital backbenchers’ job often goes unnoticed until the post-mortem of governments. Take the last NDP government that ended in 2007 — one heavily weighed down by urban MLAS with union connections who didn’t see what was coming. Like the previous NDP government of Allan Blakeney held captive by bureaucrats or professional political strategists until its 1982 demise, it did not have the backbench early warning system to alert them to the incoming conservative tsunami.

Admittedly, this hasn’t exactly been Scott Moe’s problem.

While Saskatchewan Party MLAS owed their success to premier Brad Wall, Moe’s defeat of Alanna Koch (Wall’s deputy minister and also a longtime political operative) largely can be attributed to the 22 caucus MLAS (17 of whom were rural) who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him when he made his Sask. Party leadership announcement in 2017.

From the beginning, Moe has always been one of the boys, which is fine ... except when it starts to become evident that you’ve been hanging out with the boys too much. This may be the biggest problem for the Sask. Party government — one that is the antithesis of being held captive by intellectuals and urban bureaucrats, but which may be no less problematic in the long run.

For more than a week now, we have watched with puzzlement as Moe has balked at putting needed distance between himself and the Western separatism nonsense he should be condemning as he calls for a new deal with the federal Liberal minority government.

Undoubtedly, such angry separatism is feedback Moe is getting from many of his rural MLAS.

It’s something a premier can’t ignore, but there’s always a need for a premier to properly process such information. Instead, mad grievance is this government’s central message right now, as was evident in Moe’s “prairie fire” and fury missive delivered the day after the federal election. Not only is it dangerous, it’s also offensive to a wide swath of Saskatchewan residents — many of them living in city seats Moe stands to lose a year from now because they are already tired of being branded by #rednexit.

So maybe it’s time for Moe to assess the value of his information and its sources — backbenchers buying into this angry and divisive narrative. This may be especially so after some of the things we’ve heard from backbenchers replying to the throne speech.

Normally, throne speech replies are milquetoast tributes to families and constituency office, sprinkled with mild rhetoric, but a few backbenchers this year seemed particularly inspired by Moe’s fire and brimstone.

Take Kelvington-wadena MLA Hugh Nerlien, who not only hammered away at the need for fossil fuel products but also redefined racism: “Mr. Speaker, by this definition I grew up in a world where racism existed at every turn. Immigrants from every nation-state made jokes or defined another nation-state by some derogatory descriptor,” he said. “Today racism is more defined by the colour of skin or particular physical traits, and racism by this definition exists across the world.”

But while it was bizarre to use the throne speech reply to attack “political correctness”, even less helpful are the man-made climate change denials we heard from Moe’s backbench:

“I think we have a big responsibility to clean up this province, do the things we need to do, like the plastics,” Moose Jaw North MLA Warren Michelson said. “But you can also go on the internet and you can put in ‘climate change hoax’ and you can find thousands of pieces of information from scientists that also say that we don’t have to be alarmists.”

Obviously neither Nerlien nor Michelson — a career backbencher, now retiring — speak for Moe, but he does listen to backbenchers. Perhaps he needs to be listening to others as well.