Liberal win reverses Sask. fortune
That’s quite a reversal of fortune, isn’t it? What we’re talking about here isn’t Justin Trudeau raising the Liberals from the crypt a dozen days before Halloween by winning a majority government.
No, the drastic change in Saskatchewan is going from having 13 of 14 MPs on the government side to 13 of our 14 MPs sitting in opposition.
This is Saskatchewan’s story emerging from Monday night’s federal election — a story much bigger than three New Democrats eking out seats they might have a hard time holding down the road.
To go from having a decade of having as much as 10 per cent of the entire federal government caucus coming from Saskatchewan (the case during Stephen Harper’s Conservative minority government years) is a massive change.
The first noticeable difference will be the noise level.
Opposition MPs are, by nature, louder than backbench government MPs, so expect to hear a lot more from your 10 Conservative MPs than you heard when their party was in power.
This might not be particularly easy for seven of the 10 returning Conservative incumbents who warred with the public and media over Harper government policies. It wasn’t exactly conducive to cultivating good relations with the broader spectrum of voters outside their own constituencies or the media. (Contrast the Tory MPs with Liberal Ralph Goodale, who’s been relentless in culturing both.)
That said, both the media and provincial voters at large who might have had problems with, say, soonto-be-former Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz’s bluster, are amazingly forgiving to those who are unexpectedly converted to opposition. Likely much sooner than later, we will be hearing from Conservative opposition politicians on the latest Justin Trudeau annoyance and/or slight that is of significance to voters here.
Similarly, we will be hearing much more from the NDP in Saskatchewan — not just because the province has three new NDP MPs, but also because the NDP’s slide to third-party status will require it to be more vocal just to be heard. That said, Saskatchewan’s NDP MPs would be well-advised to figure out the difference between making noise and being heard.
The NDP’s popular vote in Saskatchewan increased only slightly and the narrow margin of victories by Georgina Jolibois in DesnetheMissinippi-Churchill River, Sheri Benson in Saskatoon West and Erin Weir in Regina Lewvan suggests voters may just be viewing their elections as a four-year test-drive.
To re-establish a firm foothold here — something the NDP must do, given that it’s been 15 years since it last elected MPs in this province — will require its MPs to establish their own credibility. That requires something more than showboating or putting forward a pet-project agenda.
But of far greater interest might have been the quiet relationship between Saskatchewan politicians and the federal government that we didn’t hear so much about.
While the 13 Saskatchewan Conservative MPs in the last Parliament liked nothing more than overstating their own self-worth, the influence of any individual backbencher/ minister in a Harper government was always limited. “It was the Harper show,” a Saskatchewan Party government official said Tuesday.
And a litany of issues from equalization to lack of financial support for the stadium or provincial infrastructure bolster that argument.
That said, it can never be denied that 12 or 13 government MPs lobbying for federal spending in their ridings — be it for Saskatoon’s overpasses or Regina’s P3 sewage treatment plant or Moose Jaw’s hockey rink — had some impact.
Similarly, the more quiet, behindthe-scenes relationship between Harper and Premier Brad Wall is also now gone. Wall noted Tuesday that success with everything from the content of the Trans Pacific Partnership to the increase in uranium development and sales had a lot to do Harper’s preferred “bilateral” one-on-one conservations with the premiers like himself.
However, Wall is already cultivating a relationship with Trudeau. And the premier was among the first to note the presence of Goodale.
The proven track record of the Liberal deputy leader as the lone Saskatchewan representative in the last Liberal government (see: the Wascana Lake project; social housing initiatives under Paul Martin) underscores this. And make no mistake that Goodale will maintain massive influence in a Trudeau government.
Whether it is equivalent to the influence of 12 or 13 Conservative MPs would seem doubtful, but that might very well be in the eyes of the beholder.