Ken MacDougall
Columnist
While I should be concentrating efforts into keeping tabs on what’s going on in our Saskatchewan election, I can’t help but freak out every once in a while about our American “cousins” down south.
The polls are STILL maintaining that the race for the presidency between Vice President Kamala Harris and convicted felon (and once President) Donald J. Trump is STILL “too close to call”, and that at least 1 per cent of voters in so-called “swing states” have yet to make up their minds as to which way they are planning to vote. Equally hard to believe is the fact that the major trade unions (AFL-CIO, UAW, etc.) won’t endorse Harris, this despite the Biden – Harris team having for the last three years governed over a period of the greatest resurgence of union organization ever witnessed in the USA.
Personally, I feel that the levels of “polarization” in the American population are being greatly exaggerated by both FOX News and a pile of podcasters, including some guy I’ve never heard of, Andrew Schulz, while interviewing Trump burst into hysterical laughter when the ex-president referred to himself as “actually a very truthful person”, only days later and based solely upon the “looks” he was getting on the streets, proclaimed that a candidate considered by many to be America’s greatest threat to democracy is going to win “in a landslide.”
The reality, though, is that the Saskatchewan race is in the same “dead heat” situation as is down south, with Carla Beck’s NDP supposedly neck-and-neck with Scott Moe’s diminished Saskatchewan Party lineup – which means that IF you’re really paying attention, campaign rhetoric is just about to go into “Scream” mode.
Ironically, the first indicator suggesting that trivialities are about to become “major concerns” to one party (those on the right of the political spectrum) was when Harper clone Pierre Poilievre first aired the CPC’s latest ad bemoaning how so-called Liberal – NDP “woke” policies were undermining the nation’s “values”, as well as reducing the testosterone levels in our Canadian Armed Forces – which is the tactic Trump is now using as his campaign rhetoric goes further down the scale.
Until recently, such language has been avoided on the campaign trail, with only Scott Moe rather weakly attempting in the leadership “debate” to link the provincial NDP to the “Trudeau alliance” in Ottawa that has now produced a Dentalcare and Pharmacare program for the nation, and from which federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh withdrew the party over two weeks ago. Not to be burdened by Carla Beck refusing to take the bait on that approach, this Thursday Scott Moe decided that it was of such vital interest to the province that upon return to the Marble Palace (presumably with a majority) his first priority in enacting new legislation would be to require schools to “segregate” their washrooms by a student’s “biological” definition.
This rather obvious anti-trans approach isn’t going to do much in the way of not allowing the average “drag queen” the normal methodology for relieving themselves so much as flipping the bird at teachers who are already upset at the passage of the Parental Rights Act that the NDP has promised to rescind, and stands in the way of having teachers deal with the principal reason today’s students are questioning their own sexuality – abuse, including parental in some cases, and misogynistic bullying coming from fellow students.
The problem teachers have with this type of avoidance technique in attempting to steer contract negotiation levels towards transgenderism rather than deal with the real problems facing our schools (overcrowding, student-teacher ratios, lack of qualified EA’s and rural schools in decay, especially in the north, curriculum weaknesses and increasing degradation of our students’ academic achievements as opposed to other provinces or even other nations, as but some examples) is that following the Covid-19 pandemic (which may not yet be over) and in students increasingly relying upon social media outlets to fill their need for person-to-person communication, many have sunk into mild states of depression and anxiety, areas of mental health concern that, quite frankly, teachers have never received proper training so as to provide counselling for such trauma, and even were they able to have such students come to terms with either their depression or even sexual orientation, there is still the need for the school to provide proper protection, as the bullying isn’t going to stop without it. To put it another way, talking about “pronouns”, which is the direction in which Scott Moe wants this topic to go, isn’t the “shield” that will provide such personal protection, but rather the “comfort food” society can provide after eliminating the oppression.
There is a myriad of other directions in which this campaign should be heading, not to mention there being provided a proper public analysis as to what’s really happening to our economy, or why. For instance, there’s great “praise” for the fact that our government has been able to bring down inflation to its normal rate of around 1.4 per cent, but of what relevance to the average consumer is that fact, given that the prices of most items, especially groceries haven’t really started any form of downward trend. Butter, for instance, is still priced 45 per cent higher than in 2021, and ask any cattle rancher whether he’s able to get $56.80 / kg for a reasonably thick ribeye steak. Supply change mismanagement was what resulted in the price of goods starting to steeply rise, and now only profiteering and corporate greed are keeping these prices at the same level, all the while pretending that “inflation” is our major concern when it comes to the squeeze being applied to our wallets.
Then, there are the issues we aren’t bothering to talk about, or if we do bring them up know that someone, whether Sask Party or Sask United will start blathering about our being “extremists” in our concerns: the environment or climate change, for instance, or clear cutting, while pretending that the carbon tax is a grievous burden, even though most agricultural specialists are using the topic as a punchline they’d just heard being turned into a joke that Trump or Poilievre had just publicly stated.
We have two weeks left to determine how we will vote in this election. For those of us that want real “change”, particularly those within our Indigenous communities, we have to make our voices heard, and with no doubt as to the intention our voting preference is directing our next government to proceed.
