NDP should adopt forever Young approach
Party needs to capitalize on new, youthful energy or risks going stale
There were a lot of history lessons handed out at the Saskatchewan legislature this week. But there was one important one that wasn't much discussed.
The then-brand-new Saskatchewan Party was already starting to look like a tired, old party by the early 2000s — one that appeared incapable of a major urban breakthrough and perhaps destined for the scrap heap of political history.
But then it was revitalized by a few urban candidates winning city seats in 2003, followed by replacing Elwin Hermanson with the more charismatic and energetic Brad Wall as party leader.
The lesson: A party can grow old quite rapidly even when it's still quite young. And it runs the risk of staying old and tired for a very long time if it doesn't get energetic people to reinvigorate itself.
This takes us to the past 30 years of the Saskatchewan NDP that ran out of steam while still in government in the 1990s.
Exhausted by its struggles to deal with the massive debt left behind by the Grant Devine Progressive Conservatives of the 1980s, the best the NDP could offer in its 2007 campaign (its last as government following 16 years in power) is cheap prescriptions for seniors and low utility rates.
But no one other than yourself is going to feel sorry for you in politics, especially, if your problem is that you don't have the people, will or energy to reinvent yourself.
Consider when things went awry for the NDP and when things started to go very well for the Sask. Party.
In the early 2000s, Hermanson was replaced by
Wall and a crew of generation X-ers that immediately embarked on appealing to what it described as the suburban soccer moms.
In 2001, the NDP was exceedingly content with its status quo, replacing pre-baby boomer Roy Romanow with baby boomer Lorne
Calvert. In doing so, the
NDP rejected the campaign of generation X-er Scott Banda and his similar-aged supporters that then drifted away from the party to successful leadership roles outside politics.
Really, it lost a whole generation and then exacerbated the problem by selecting another baby-boomer/allan Blakeney-era leader in Dwain Lingenfelter. Three elections later, an uninspired NDP Opposition remains stuck in the same rut. But history tells us that sometimes all it takes to spark change is a single event or person.
This is why it has been interesting to watch newly elected Regina University MLA Aleana Young square off with Trade and Export Minister Jeremy Harrison of late over — of all things — the past 30 years of the NDP.
Blessed with a seemingly limitless capacity to get under the skin of Harrison (whom she calls the worst economy minister in Canada) and virtually everyone else in the government caucus, Young may be what's been missing in the NDP for quite some time.
Admittedly, Young isn't the only one in the small, 13-member Opposition caucus contributing. And, more significantly, one requires a telescope to see how far away from power the NDP still is.
But Young and the NDP are surely not wrong about the deficit/debt mess the Sask. Party has overseen and are generally right that Saskatchewan seems to be re-entering a dangerous period of job and even population loss.
To this, it's Harrison who has been sounding more like a former governing New Democrat, still blaming the past administration after more than a decade in power.
It wasn't a good look then. It's not a good look now. But right now, Young gets that more than Harrison does.
In fact, in response to Harrison's threadbare blame-everything-on-1990s new-democrats approach, Young later posted on her Twitter account a picture of herself as a kid in the 1990s. Several New Democrats quickly joined in the fun with 30-year-old childhood pictures of their own.
Recent history also teaches us oppositions have no chance of improving their lot unless they are united, energetic and having a bit of fun.
Quietly — or perhaps not so quietly — Young may be providing Saskatchewan New Democrats with the vitality they've been missing.