GOODALE SWEPT ASIDE
Liberals blanked in Sask., Alta.
REGINA Unless you voted Bloc Quebecois, the Oct. 21 federal election was probably a disappointment. It seemed an election that no one won.
That was especially true in Saskatchewan.
The Conservatives won every seat in the province, but lost what looked like a solid chance to send a Saskatchewan MP to the Prime Minister’s Office.
The Liberals returned to power with a minority, but lost their only link with a deeply skeptical Saskatchewan.
The NDP lost all three of its seats. There were no Prairie breakthroughs for the Greens or the PPC.
At Conservative HQ in Regina’s International Trade Centre, the mood was bittersweet. Supporters celebrated as the networks called riding after riding for the party, sometimes by immense margins.
Someone changed the channel whenever the talking heads declared that the Liberals would remain the largest party, thanks to continued pre-eminence in Ontario. The prospect that Justin Trudeau would stick around triggered anger, even fear.
“The last four years have decimated our family,” said John Breakey, an oilman from southeast Saskatchewan. “I could not go another four years.”
The same ambivalence prevailed among Liberals at the Regina German Club. It was just reversed. The news that prompted jubilation across the railroad tracks brought this room to tears:
Ralph Goodale’s 26-year run representing Regina-wascana was over.
Goodale was more than a man. He was a rebuke to common wisdom. Liberals could, somehow, win in this province. In 2015, his eighth straight victory allowed the party to hold itself out as a national government.
But there wouldn’t be a ninth. Goodale had lived through the long-gun registry, Stéphane Dion’s green shift, even the disaster of Michael Ignatieff.
He couldn’t survive four years of Trudeau.
Goodale’s loss, by 7,176 votes to a self-described “nerdy information consultant,” showed how bad things had become. There was now no easy response to warnings Saskatchewan was on the outside, fuming. The political estrangement with Ottawa seemed complete.
The defeat was only a symbol, of course. It was easier to grasp than the numbers. But the numbers, in many ways, were far worse.
The Liberal Party of Canada won just 11.6 per cent of the popular vote in Saskatchewan.
The Conservatives didn’t just win every seat. They ran away with them. In some rural ridings, like Cypress Hills-grasslands, they took more than 80 per cent of the vote.
Something else became apparent that night in Regina. Cries for western separation, long confined to the fringes, were about to get a lot louder.
You could hear them at the International Trade Centre, even before the results placed #Wexit among the top trending hashtags on social media.
“Western Canada will get up in arms and we will do Wexit and that will be it for the Trudeau legacy,” said Barry Harris.
The new reality we all woke up to on Oct. 22 probably won’t break up the country. But the divisions feel starker. The crisis seems more urgent.
There’s little doubt we’ll feel it in provincial politics in the run-up to the 2020 election. Premier Scott Moe set the course on the morning after, when he seized on the frustrations to drive home his demands for concessions from Ottawa.
He warned that a fire is burning on the Prairies. The months ahead will be dominated by talk of how to put out the flames.