Note: On July 13th, Columnist Ken MacDougall published “Preying upon rural pride now a standard practice in Sask. Party campaign appeals”, the first of three “OpEd” columns outlining how the Saskatchewan Party has been manipulating rural voters through questionable campaigning practice. That column may be found at https://paherald.sk.ca/latest-posts-ken-macdougall/ .
Politicians make mistakes; if they didn’t, life would be boring, we’d be deprived of our “right” to be annoyed, and no one would bother to show up for campaign rallies. It would also be nice if, even once in a proverbial “blue moon” someone in Cabinet would have the stones to stand up in the Legislature or Parliament and say, “Yes, we goofed, but we’re working on correcting our mistake.”
Unfortunately, the atmosphere in governmental circles when the Romanow government came to power in 1991 was toxic. The formality of its obligation to so inform became the casualty of a harried premier having to wreck his Brooks Brothers suits in crawling on hands and knees before New York bankers seeking some way to bail us out of the specter of our own “Canadian” banks refusing to cash civil service pay cheques until they’d “officially” cleared the government’s own accounts. Fortunately for this province, then PM Brian Mulroney in 1993 was finally able to provide some relief mere days before the province would have been forced to default on all loan repayments, signalling to the world that we were, indeed, “bankrupt”.
The federal government’s help notwithstanding, it should be noted that when it came to the need to implement reform economic practices for funding Medicare, the Mulroney’s decision in 1989 to cut back on the number of doctors being funded for training in Canada and shrink such funding as would normally have gone towards the training of new “general physicians” (GP’s) is still creating havoc in providing us with such practitioners to this day.
Equally concerning, a problem that was evident to anyone with a reasonable intellect in 1989, that being the reality of Canada’s “baby boomer” generation was now getting older and would put further pressure upon the provinces to provide adequate health care services, was never considered by the collective stream of hard core “Conservative” premiers [Don Getty, AB; Grant Devine, SK; John Buchanan, NS; Bill Vander Zalm, BC; etc.] as “the” reason why health care funding was putting an increasing strain upon their budgets.
At this point, we have to start worrying about our new crop of “conservative” premiers (Scott Moe, Danielle Smith and Doug Ford, in particular), who are in soto voce with the current Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre demanding massive budget cuts and serious decreases in tax rates. Personally, I wonder whether any of them learn from the predecessors’ many fiscal errors in judgment, especially when we look at the current grave issues facing health care funding today.
Other than a shortage of doctors, we are also now seeing waiting times for surgeries, particularly in the orthopaedic sector, increasing in all provinces, despite these various governments pretending that they’ve got the situation “well in hand” – and yet no one in government is bothering to mention that Canada’s second population “baby boom”, that being Gen X, is now making itself a factor in the “older but not necessarily any wiser” generations suffering from the inevitable calamities of just plain “getting old”.
No ”conservative” government in its right mind is ever going to make the connection between increasing health care costs and the Over 50 crowd, simply because that’s the population dynamic that provide critical support to their political agenda. This is particularly true in rural areas of the province, where those that can still remember harvesting days where entire communities were working on neighbours’ fields to put the harvest into the bin or local elevator, and where it was a matter of considerable pride that their ability to work in such comforted surroundings was driven by their paradoxical “individualized” sense of what they were able to contribute to such tasks.
Few of the now fully incorporated and much younger agricultural producers either believe the stories their older relatives told them about how it became necessary for their generations to band together in a co-operative movement to circumvent the exploitive tactics of agriculture machinery dealers from Ontario and the United States selling equipment inadequately engineered for the Prairie terrain. This younger generation’s almost visceral “contempt” for their Elders’ issues has been replaced with their now feeling a sense of almost egotistical “pride” in their own accomplishment, a misplaced sense of security of the “individual” capable of conquering the land’s many obstacles, and doing so “on their own”.
It does not take a genius to recognize just how quickly these conservative-bent governments have moved to take advantage of this naivete. Governments only watched while our national railways shed themselves of the need to suffer grain transportation revenue losses as a result of the Crow’s Nest Pass Agreement, then followed this up by decommissioning feeder lines to the main rail traffic routes, leaving the farmers either deserted on these feeder lines or provide their own crop transportation to inland elevators. It only remained for the Harper government in 2014 to appoint Minister of Agriculture Gerry Ritz to “privatize” the Canada Wheat Board so that farmers could finally now “control” all aspects of their operations, including the sale of their crops to buyers of their own choosing.
The privatization of the Wheat Board eventually created chaos within the agribusiness sector, as the larger buyers were temporarily given carte blanche to try and prioritize the movement of their purchased grain stocks to foreign markets, resulting in major delays to delivery schedules as whole trains were now being shuffled around to accommodate the buyers’ shipping demands. In the end, the chaos delivered by the blatant homage to capitalistic principles resulted in the “average” grain producer losing approximately $114,000 of bottom line to Mr. Ritz’s scheme, or some $5 billion, province-wide.
In today’s profit-driven grain marketing scenario, there isn’t a farmer in this province, large or small, who doesn’t know of smaller business acquaintances who are persuaded by various agrobusinesses to accept contracts whose delivery dates are meaningless and for which there is no penalty for breaking such arrangement. Equally disgusting is the increasing tally of smaller producers asked to deliver their crop to a non-local elevator, only to arrive at the delivery point and be told that their crop has deteriorated by as much as 90% since leaving home, leaving the producer with three options, none of which is worthwhile: selling the contents for animal feed, dumping the cargo to save fuel costs on the way home, or just taking everything back to where it once was.
These things do happen – and yet the Saskatchewan Party, ever aware of such abuse yet unwilling to come to their supporters’ defense with laws that would end such exploitation once and for all.
Still, the Sask. Party insists upon calling itself “the voice of rural Saskatchewan”…
