Time to toss fixed election dates in Sask.

Michael Boda is waiting, but he's probably used to that.

Boda, Saskatchewan's chief electoral officer, has once again proposed a solution to conflicting election dates two years from now.

Yet it appears his report is gathering dust, when the province should instead be robustly gathering input from voters on his suggestion to try to separate the next provincial election from the vote for city and town councils.

Boda's report will turn one year old in August. Like all one-year-olds, it needs some attention.

Boda has proposed moving the 2024 elections for the province's 450 so-called urban municipalities — including 16 cities, 147 towns and 287 villages — from the fall to the spring.

That would end decades of fall elections, but would resolve the looming conflict between the next provincial and municipal votes.

The next Saskatchewan election is scheduled for Oct. 28, 2024. The next elections for the province's urban municipalities is set for Nov. 9 that same year.

Those overlapping elections exist because Premier Scott Moe's Saskatchewan Party government decided that's when the 2020 elections would take place, even though Boda warned three years earlier about the conflict.

The last time, Boda offered the province three — yes, three — options to resolve the conflict created by provincial and municipal votes scheduled five days apart.

Moe chose none of these, opting instead to create a little more space between the elections, but failing to resolve any of the logistical issues created by overlapping campaigns and the strain on volunteers and polling locations.

What's the worst that could happen, you can imagine the Saskatchewan Party brain trust asking itself rhetorically — a monster snowstorm disrupting democracy?

That's exactly what did happen, of course. A snowstorm disrupted voting and forced the postponement of elections in Saskatoon and Swift Current.

This time around, Boda is only pitching one simple solution. He has proposed moving urban municipal elections to May 8, 2024, and making that date permanent to resolve the conflict.

It might prove unpopular with municipal politicians who are used to fall campaigns and the scheduling around them, but any alternative is better than voting in November.

So who should be blamed for this democratic mess? Depending on your affiliation, you could blame former NDP premier Lorne Calvert or former Saskatchewan Party premier Brad Wall.

Calvert started the November election trend in 2003 and Wall won the 2007 November election called by Calvert. Wall then declared, with no apparent consultation or research, that all future provincial elections would be held every four years on the first Monday in November.

Or, if you prefer, you can do what Saskatchewan does best: Blame the feds. Former prime minister Stephen Harper set the 2015 federal election for October, even though he had won the previous election in May 2011. That forced the 2015 Saskatchewan election to be bumped to the spring of 2016 under the province's dubious fixed election law and then moved the following election to the fall of 2020. That ultimately created the conflict that persists today.

Finding space between elections seems an easy fix that most other provinces have figured out. June, by the way, far outpaces all other months for previous Saskatchewan elections.

The perception you can't call an election during seeding or harvest has subsided, since agriculture now accounts for less than five per cent of employment in the province. Plus, mailin ballots and advance voting offer flexibility.

Yet the reason behind the apparent reluctance of the provincial government to simply adopt Boda's proposal seems obvious: Moe probably wants the flexibility to call an election in the spring if that proves advantageous.

He was planning an early election call for the spring of 2020, despite the sacred scheduled election date, when the COVID-19 pandemic ruined his plans.

Moe shelved his snap election strategy on the same day the province's first diagnosed case of COVID-19 was made public.

It's already too late to give municipalities and voters two years' warning about a move to the spring for the next elections. But the least the government could do is eliminate the farce of fixed election legislation that's been exposed as more laughable than legitimate.