Sask. needs less ying-yang talk; Moe yin-yang balance
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe found himself with a whole box of figurative firecrackers to play with this week and a seemingly inexhaustible list of places to insert them.
Much of his explosiveness was reserved for seven in Regina city council's environmental sharing circle who voted to ban fossil fuel companies from advertising at city events or sponsoring city facilities. It beats council actually doing something concrete ... like banning concrete (or maybe asphalt made from the aforementioned petroleum products) that is warming our planet.
But Moe had plenty o' firecrackers left over: There was one for the president of Pfizer (whose international revenues of $59 billion are roughly four times that of the Province of Saskatchewan) for not getting COVID-19 vaccines here fast enough. He even had one for newly minted U.S. President Joe Biden surely quaking in his boots at the words of Western Canadian premiers' threats after the cancellation of Keystone XL pipeline permit.
Of course, the rest of the firecrackers are meant for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But that goes without saying.
To be precise here, we are mostly talking about Moe's sentiments rather than his specific words. He didn't actually suggest he would shove a firecracker anywhere. Moe was really just parroting Doug Ford's words regarding the Pfizer executive's ying-yang, but Saskatchewan's foremost rectal pyrotechnic practitioner did eagerly volunteer to stand behind the Ontario premier with a lighted match.
When the witticisms of Doug Ford become the foundation of your government's communication strategy, maybe it's time to re-evaluate.
What Moe did do was subtly remind the city that Regina gets about $29 million a year from Saskpower surcharges and $4.3 million from Saskenergy surcharges. If Regina councillors “have such a strong aversion to accepting money from energy companies I assume they will no longer want to receive these funds, which could instead be distributed to other Saskatchewan municipalities,” said Moe, oblivious to the notion that Saskpower/saskenergy are actually independent, publicly owned utilities and not specifically mandated to carry out political threats of the governing party.
Nice little city you have there. Be a shame if anything happened to it. And you best get your cops to take down those Co-op picket lines if you know what's good for you.
There again, if your vision doesn't extend much beyond throwing hamburger to your red-meat rural base/oil company supporters (disturbingly, Moe's Twitter fatwa was issued an hour after an oil company/executive coincidentally lobbied him to do so), sitting back and waiting for urban councillors to do something incredibly stupid may be one sound strategy.
And, make no mistake that it is stupid/hypocritical for Regina council to punish any group “whose business is principally derived from the sale or production of fossil fuel.”
“I think that's the very reason why we don't want sex, drugs, and rock and roll advertised on our buildings,” said Ward 6 Coun. Daniel Leblanc, who evidently skipped his teenage years.
Really? Has budding political force Leblanc considered the jobs/ taxes his city gets from the Federated Co-op Ltd./co-op Regina Complex that happens to sponsor Regina's emergency alert system? Is the Co-op the equivalent of Pornhub? Their commercial theme music is from the Littlest Hobo, for goodness sake!
But setting aside all the virtue signalling from local civic politicians who, sadly, seldom matter to voters until they do something dopey, one gets the frustration with our single-message premier now wandering about looking for political bar fights.
The province's lack of a discernible greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction strategy is bad enough. However, going through with a plan to defund the city (punishing every taxpayer in the capital city just to appease a few rural voters) may result in Regina council lawyers having a firecracker for the premier.
More to the point, Saskatchewan works best if there's less ying-yang talk and more of a yin-yang balance between the interests of the critical resource sector and those of everyone. Let's try that.