I don’t “get it”; In virtually every national poll measuring the “popularity” of each of the provincial premiers, Scott Moe runs a reasonably respectable 51per cent. My politically jaded reaction to this statistic is that I don’t know 51 voters who’d concur with this analysis, especially when compared to the universally acknowledged and well accepted 65 per cent, garnered by Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew.
In some ridings, Kinew’s rating is overblown. For some voters, he is a premier who should still be in jail. In “The Reason You Walk”, Kinew has taken to the task of confronting this same accusation – his being convicted of assault, drunk driving, refusing a breathalyzer, and breaching probation in his early twenties – with a brutal honesty that no reader would ever suggest that he was “laden with excuses rationalizing his anti-social behaviour”. Now, try to compare such self-analysis with the “sins” of past behaviours performed by our premier.
Scott Moe’s “history” of TWICE executing “Quebec stops” at signed intersections that resulted in serious traffic accidents, including one person, Joanne Balog, dying in May of 1997. In his first incident in 1994 he was formally charged under DUI regulation and leaving the scene of the accident, both of which were eventually stayed, yet even in their recognizing the eery similarity of these accidents, the investigating RCMP officer did not execute a breathalyzer test as they did the first time, but only issued a ticket for driving without due care and attention.
To be fair, Premier Moe should be allowed the reprieve that Premier Kinew received from having his transgressions pardoned. However, what truly sickens me that in giving the premier such a benefit of doubt, I still can’t understand why he hasn’t since ripped up the political playbook that former Premier Brad Wall left him, thus allowing the Saskatchewan Party to pretend that “they” are still the “true supporters” of rural folk and the many persons in Saskatchewan still employed by our petroleum extracting industries.
I don’t really “blame” Premier Moe for harbouring such sentiments towards rural Saskatchewanians and petroleum industry workers alike, as most of the SP’s stupidities were initiated by former Devine civil servant and Premier Brad Wall. When he first became the party’s leader, he soon realized that the two NDP governments that had worked to repay Devine’s $28 billion deficit and threat to the province of bankruptcy, they’d eventually fall victim to any even minor public relation strains created by a decade of monetary restraint and not being able to offer the public newer and much needed redefined and reformed programs, especially when it came to spending monies on health services and public education platforms. In 2007 Wall then “suggesting” that rural Saskatchewan had already been hurt by the NDP for allegedly “closing over 50 hospitals”, including one in Prince Albert, and they were about to do the same thing with their local schools. This public exercise in political indoctrination held some measure of truth with voters tired of paying for Devine’s mistakes, and Wall got what he wanted – the premiership, and an opportunity to reintroduce Saskatchewan to right-wing politics that only underwhelm economic growth potential world-wide.
Since that victory, the Saskatchewan Party has done nothing save present legislation that incorporates the American right’s concept as to what is merited legislation (e.g.: the Public Service Essential Services Act, an anti-union law drafted by the Koch Brothers-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)), only to be found unconstitutional by Canada’s Supreme Court, a fate that await the misguided and Alberta plagiarizing Saskatchewan First Act created by Moe’s government in 2023.
In 2016, Moe decided to “advise” his candidates to refrain from participating in public “issue-related” debates, fatuously maintaining that such forums were only exercises in cacophony of sound, prove nothing and provide even less “fact”, all while denying voters the “right” to have voters meeting candidates on their very doorsteps. That ploy worked as well, with the Saskatchewan Party winning 51 of the 61 Legislative seats, with even NDP leader Cam Broten losing his race to featherweight SP candidate David Buckingham.
In highlighting these “enlightened” procedures concocted by former Premier Wall, there’s a pattern here that sharply focused upon the distinctions in personality and political performance between Scott Moe and Wab Kinew, especially when it comes to dealing with our 17 per cent Indigenous population. Kinew simply refuses to accept that racial sentiment does not dictate how a government should approach in seeking remediation of political concerns. During the 2023 Manitoba election campaign, Kinew promised the province’s Indigenous community that a government elected with him as premier and regardless of cost tear apart the Winnipeg dump in which Marcedes Myran and Morgan Harris had “allegedly” been buried by serial killer Jeremy Skibicki – and did just that, DESPITE that approach being heavily criticized by the Winnipeg Police and then Premier Heather Stefanson’s Progressive Conservatives.
In effect, Kinew’s solution resulted in these women being brought home to their loved ones to be properly buried and remembered for the lives they had led. Still, even though the criticism of his actions were still being whispered among Manitoba’s malcontents, he then wandered into the PC-held riding of Spruce Woods and had Manitoba repair crews radically restructure a critical section of Manitoba’s Highway 2 between Souris and Deleau, a problem that had been ignored for decades by previously elected PC governments, including Stefanson’s – a move that not only improved his popularity status, but as a healer of political ills and racial confrontation – despite him being “Indigenous”…in the CONSERVATIVE riding of Spruce Woods, despite the situation having been ignored by the previous administration headed by PC Premier Heather Stefanson. In effect, Premier Wab Kinew is now considered by people of ALL political stripes to be a healer of wounds – AND he’s “Indigenous”…
In fairness again, Wall did no favours to Scott Moe in issues relating to our 17 per cent Indigenous population. Wall also did the north, and Prince Albert in particular, when he “chose” Carleton MLA Joe Hargrave to axe the Saskatchewan Transportation Company and incorporate provincial taxes on SGI insurance policies, while ignoring the need to fulfill the promise of the city getting that second bridge, fixing the transportation infrastructure of the north and the city becoming the economic gateway directing the region’s future economic success that would be managed by true northerners, not the carpetbaggers claiming “ownership” coming from Saskatoon and elsewhere.
Moe’s “gift” to our city consists of an expansion to Highway 55, now jokingly referred to as the “Scott Moe Expressway” allowing him to get from the airport to Shellbrook in record time, while allowing our current neutered SP MLA’s to wax eloquently about a “heliport” that will soon grace the revitalized Union Hospital, but in actuality reminding us that such a commodity is necessary. His government has done nothing with the north’s transportation infrastructure and its chronic medical facility shortage and that even if patients are brought in from these remote locales, the service also must consider re-transporting these same patients because, unlike BC or Manitoba, even we don’t have sufficient medical staff to take advantage of our modernized operating theatres and send them to Saskatoon or Edmonton.
Being “popular” does not imply “being competent” in providing government services we need to improve our economic standing – leadership does. Right now, Scott Moe is failing in reaching that goal.
