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Why both federal and provincial politicians are increasingly courting the Indigenous vote (Part 3 of 3)

Ken MacDougall
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Why both federal and provincial politicians are increasingly courting the Indigenous vote (Part 3 of 3)

Whether they like it or not, every political party in Canada, be it federal or provincial, has an obligation to consult with our Indigenous communities. The problem is, most leaders haven’t a clue as to how to do this effectively, and for the centre-right organizations, their leaders might as well all have come down with laryngitis the microsecond such talks have to begin.

Herein lies the “problem”. Most Canadian haven’t the vaguest idea as to how financial arrangements are structured when it comes to our federal/provincial governments dealing with First Nations groups, and to be honest about it, NEITHER the Liberal nor Conservative parties want the public to be better informed. There’s a reason for them taking that position as well, that being when they actually do have some cash to “splash” to Indigenous communities, they can make a “big deal” as to their “generosity” – and in the process allow the lesser of our non-biased leaders such as former premier Brad Wall, whenever there inevitably ends up there being a shortfall in the monies available to complete a project (e.g.: the elementary school in La Loche, where funding for a traditional community kitchen somehow “forgot” to be added to the school’s construction costs), the communities are told to “ease up” on the coin, and if they really “need” that kitchen (or the gym equipment also left off the list, for that matter), go do their “begging” at Cameco’s doorstep.

If you can’t “understand” why this attitude is so sickening to listen to, ask yourself this question – which may not seem relevant at the moment, but wait for your own answer to find out why it’s relevant to this discussion:

IF a landlord decides to rent a specific property, how much should he/she REASONABLY charge for the occupation of that property?

If you don’t “understand” the question, then you’re most likely a Canadian who gets his “news” from the FOX Network. OUR nation was formed on the basis of PEACEFUL negotiation with our First Nation brethren through Treaties, legal documents in which in RETURN for the British Empire being able to share the land in peace and harmony, trade with one another in good faith, and rely upon each other’s military support in times of conflict, the colonizers must be prepared to provide and maintain lands upon which these Nations traditionally resided, and allow for the changes of such boundaries as their own populations increased.

In other words, your taxes are your “rent” for the privilege of living in Canada.

To be honest, the early European empires who colonized Canada, France and Britain, accepted such terms as reasonable and adhered to the Treaty promises almost without question, which is why most of the issues arising from the “language” of such negotiation become increasingly litigious as one moves westward across Canada, where over time the condescendingly paternalistic nature of the colonialist “elite” enacted convoluted laws to provide exceptions to treaty law.

One of the major issues thus confronting Canadians, particularly in our province, is that in not understanding Treaty language or knowing their terms, bad actors can increasingly rely upon the misinformation created by such lack of legal knowledge as to the nature of treaty entitlement so as to retain that power. Thus, “They (i.e.: Indigenous peoples) don’t pay any taxes…” becomes a truism, even though those entitled to First Nation citizenry DO in fact pay such fare when living on the lands governed by descendants of the original two “founding” colonizers. 

It doesn’t take a “genius” to realize that once a foothold is made in the sand based upon prejudice it doesn’t take long for the list of “ailments” afflicting First Nation peoples in general to be expanded to accommodate the prejudice and feed upon its growth. Often it results in this updated rendition of nonsense is delivered with a vacuous sense of piety and religiosity, such as how “they” drain social services resources, or that “property values” take a nose dive whenever “they” move in “next door”.

And then there’s “CRIME”, that perpetration of the evilness of all societies that sticks to the moccasins of Indigenous peoples as rigorously as toilet paper does to Donald Trump’s shoes, and suddenly we have opened our minds to the idea of punishment, perhaps on a more permanent basis than our so-called “permissive” laws now allow.

One has to note with equal portions of amusement and disdain how Conservatives categorize the prevalence of criminal activity as a genetic trait of the perpetrator, when in fact it is more likely a result of economic mismanagement and malaise than anything else. Yes, First Nations are now attempting to grapple with the after-effects of mental anguish brought about by a government incapable of developing a mandate that addressed the need to limit the social abnormalities created by the Covid-19 pandemic, resulting in increased usage of harm-inducing drugs, overconsumption of alcohol, violence and death – all of which find their origins in the reality that economic opportunity eludes them, especially on reserve lands.

Even more sickening is the now obvious reality that this province has not properly invested in the psychiatric and psychological treatment services necessary for their people to heal, so that they can then deal with the gangs that have grown through their leadership offering fake promise to link their joining the ranks to the protection of their own people. In fact, it is their own people who end up suffering the most and becoming the victims of their tyranny.

In the end, then, it is the conservative elements of society that must now drive this urgent need to begin their economic negotiation with our First Nations. Such consideration should worry Liberal Party leadership, who know full well that their governments, along with those managed by Conservatives, have constantly “borrowed” from the resources set aside by past governments to the tune of some $500 billion or more in order to feed their own prioritized interests. 

Conservatives, however, prefer to ignore their own negligence in failing to honour Treaty commitments, and rather than replenishing these funds choose instead to provide economic development to Indigenous communities by, in the words of Pierre Poilievre, “We need to get the Ottawa gatekeepers out of the way, put First Nations in control of their money, and let them bring home the benefits that are dually theirs.” To most Indigenous leaders, such a promise is merely an attempt at something called “economic reconciliation”, a solution that in the words of podcaster Janelle Lapointe merely “implies that a mere financial transaction can erase the deep scars inflicted upon our communities and restore justice.”

Implicit in Lapointe’s dissection of Poilievre’s statement is that he is “tone deaf”. First Nations leaders will never take such advice to heart, as to do so leaves questions as what may happen to their people once such economic activity ceases. Simply put, Poilievre is not asking for input, in effect only continuing to deal with Treaty language and intent in the most paternalistic of manners and expectation of outcome. This leaves open an opportunity for Carla Beck and her NDP caucus, at least on the provincial side of matters, to need only ask our Indigenous leaders what they see as the ingredients structuring this path to recovery, and in what priority such factors be addressed. 

To strengthen any commitment to address First Nation concerns, the leadership of the NDP, both at the provincial and federal levels, must be prepared to sit with First Nation leaders and share their thoughts as “equals” in this discussion – something that current premier Scott Moe is oblivious to as he continues in his vain attempts to grasp constitutional power away from his federal counterparts.

How our agricultural voices demanding economic change invariably turn these same voices into victims

Ken MacDougall
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How our agricultural voices demanding economic change invariably turn these same voices into victims

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”…

Preying upon farmer pride now a standard practice in conservative disinformation campaign appeals

Ken MacDougall
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Preying upon farmer pride now a standard practice in conservative disinformation campaign appeals

One of the many things I have never questioned about politics as they’re practiced in Saskatchewan has been the need for farmers’ voices, particularly those who choose to practice their art within a small but family-based enterprise, is for these entrepreneurs to have a voice in government.

Moreover, the voice must be provided the courtesy of such individuals occasionally waxing nostalgically as to the hardship of their toil, so that the general public actually understands how difficult a task it is for them to come to an agreement with Nature to assure there is food on the table, a task which no one who’s never tried to work a garden in their back yard will never in their lifetime understand.

For the past fifteen years or more, the Saskatchewan Party has taken ownership of that voice. They have done so by taking full advantage of the suffering inflicted by cutbacks and economic restructuring as the Romanow government attempted to resurrect the province’s economy after the Devine Comedy’s governance. Were it not for the fact that the delivery of health care and educational services to rural Saskatchewan were the priorities driving this period of realignment of services, voters may well have accepted the NDP’s cryptic explanation of blaming the procedure upon Devine’s neglect of these tasks and stayed loyal to the NDP. However, when educational reform led to the elimination of numerous small school boards and it became necessary for hard decisions to be made with respect to which schools would have to be closed, the government, rather than laying that task at the feet of newly elected school board trustees, decided to take the heat for making these choices, again without providing the public their reason for making such choices.

Seeing that weakness in their message, the Saskatchewan Party began their campaign to further denigrate the NDP agenda, combining half truths with the pain and suffering within communities from the government having to rebalance our provincial economy to produce a propaganda epidemic that only further agitated voter feelings towards an NDP that really hadn’t the time to tell the whole story as to “why” things had to happen the way they were. 

Health care became the SP’s favourite target. Suddenly a local clinic, having been built earlier through the community’s strong desire to have health care close and available to their families, were regaled with the “horror stories” of their former “hospitals” having been subjectively closed by the NDP, only to be reopened and now also providing supplemental government programs such as mental health care or senior citizen home aid, only then to receive the downgrading of their previous “hospital” designation to one of “clinic”.

In all, the Saskatchewan Party labeled some 50 communities with having been plagued by this affliction. It never seemed to occur to voters that the reasons for having made such changes – laying off of kitchen staff, as an example, because there were no longer a large number of patients in the “hospital’s” beds, and a clinic 20 clicks down the road could handle any recently bedridden patients with minimal strain on family being able to visit the infirm. 

That the Sask Party during this period of their political reign may now be criticized for never having bothered with these same 50 communities to reverse the “trauma” unleashed upon these small rural setting might be a good rejoinder to parry the same blithering nonsense they have propagated over the past fifteen years; however, the weight of any Official Opposition’s rebuke would be underwhelming, especially if the public, particularly in rural Saskatchewan, were made aware of the forces driving the need for reform of health care funding in the very near future.

By now the public is all too aware that small rural hospital outlets cannot afford to employ highly skilled professional specialists such as endocrinologists or paediatric heart surgeons – or child psychiatrists, for that matter, as Prince Albert is all too aware. Even so, their sudden realization to these facts were tempered by an almost ten year delay wherein Saskatchewan’s doctors, responding to the need for reorganization provided their own “fix” to the negativity generated by the Sask Party in denigrating the seeming “disappearance” of hospitals by establishing physician teams that could function as intermediate surgical providers utilizing the “specialist” component of their G.P. training to reduce the workload on the province’s eight true hospital centres. 

Were it not for the Shaunavon – Eastend – Climax area being able to utilize the surgical training and expertise of Eastend’s Dr. Anthony Price, or Loon Lake and Goodsoil benefiting from the orthopedic and anesthesiologic skills of Doctors Frank Scott and David Morton, many rural support systems would have collapsed much earlier than now.

What reform to health care practice now required is even more staggering and complicated than what the Romanow government faced in 1991. The federal component of the government, whether under Liberal or Conservative leadership, still treats health care as the newborn baby still screaming for breast milk mere minutes after nursing.

Here in Saskatchewan, we allow health care staff shortages to reach crisis mode before freaking out, relying on Third World nations to bail us out of crisis mode, as they have done to the Philippines in nurse recruitment. As for working with our people “resources”, especially those in the north, we have yet to even consider implementing newer training methodologies as are being tried (and working well) in northern Ontario.

Rural readers shouldn’t get upset at the manner in which I’ve described how the Saskatchewan Party has convinced rural Saskatchewan residents to believe that the NDP “destroyed” their local health care options, because that never happened. Our grandparents responded co-operatively in providing for a community need, but the Sask Party government, rather than committing monies to continue such reform, chose instead to concentrate on what they really wanted, that being for their supporters to benefit from the future exploitation of our natural resources and emerging “green” technologies they currently ridicule as being wasteful. 

Even now, however, the Moe government is focusing upon policies that will next dupe rural voters into believing that the NDP’s progressive ideas in the areas of food sustainability, “job killing” regulation, land management and addressing climate change will restrain the province from becoming the economic powerhouse that it potentially could be. How this manoeuvre will eventually create permanent harm for our farming communities I will leave for next week’s column to address. 

Premier’s Dinner message laden with historical “revisionism”

Ken MacDougall
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Premier’s Dinner message laden with historical “revisionism”

As a teacher, I have always been puzzled as to why it is that, while mathematics as a subject may have its divergent streams, Algebra and Geometry being but two of them, all such streams share common axioms and suppositions that guide researchers into seeking new application of the subject’s matter. History, on the other hand, appears to have no such guidelines, even if it seems that a collective group of scholars are attempting to describe a particular event “exactly” as it occurred, with cause, effect and the event itself rolled up into one comprehensive and universally accepted “truth”.

Unfortunately, political science and economic policy often require an historical event to guide its many researchers into concluding that “were such-and-such” to have happened in a prescribed manner, an economic agenda would evolved from its passage that ultimately all mankind would eventually pursue. Also, unfortunately, since this almost never occurs, such practitioners of these “inexact sciences” then “rewrite” history in an alternative form so as to allow their theories to remain “alive” yet still considered and respected by their peers. 

Such a “rewrite” of history now has its own label: historical revisionism, and while normally it has been utilized in describing a dispute between Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky as to the creation of the Marxist-Leninist state of Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution, its current practitioners are more likely to be adherents sworn to follow the economic tenets of capitalism, like our illustrious premier, Scott Moe. Nothing illustrates this factor more than as how he shaped his speech to the annual Premier’s Dinner held just over two weeks ago in Saskatoon.

At his Dinner, Premier Moe makes no effort to portray himself as anything other than a leader following a natural economic course that he believes is bringing prosperity and opportunity to Saskatchewan residents. In his battle, however, he is once more seeking to lead the party through this era utilizing his revisionist suggestion that the NDP is merely a coalition of individuals bound together by their radically created ideas of environmental or socialized thought, which can only be defeated IF everyone “of right mind” resists the temptation to vote for minorly divergent parties that “share” the thoughts and beliefs of the SP, including the Saskatchewan United or the separatist-leaning Buffalo and Maverick parties.

In effect, Moe is trying to sell his re-election based upon the reality that there are only two alternatives to eventually rule Saskatchewan following the predicted Oct. 28 provincial election – either his SP candidates or those standing for the NDP under Carla Beck’s leadership. It is at this point, however, that he expands his perspective to introduce factors not supported by historical precedent, that being first the “accidental” election of an NDP government in Alberta with 40 per cent of the vote, coming “up the middle” between the parties – Wild Rose and Conservative, sharing similar economic perspectives. To Moe, the merging of both entities into the UCP was the only way for Alberta to “correct” this mistake and send Rachel Notley back to the back benches of Opposition status.

Even here, Moe’s statistics lack any conviction or ties to historical reality. Despite a “unified front” against Notley’s NDP, the percentage of votes received by NDP candidates went up some 5 per cent. More to the point, were he to argue this same point in regard to Saskatchewan’s NDP history, he should have known that in 1991 Roy Romanow led the NDP to a 52 per cent total of all votes cast shellacking of the remaining parties, hardly an “up the middle” victory in any sense of statistical logic.

However, it is in the arena of regulation that Moe’s arguments lose the most credibility. Having completely ignored any reference to the need to address climate change, he suggests that the NDP opposition is anti-job, wherein their philosophy before development of an economically progressive policy is held back by their insinuation upon creating regulation under which relevant industries are expected to operate. Without such regulation in place and enforcement of such legislation provided for in environmental acts, we are now forced to consider having to upgrade our water treatment plants so as to filter “forever chemicals” from our drinking water, commodities that now regularly create health concerns that an anti-Covid m-RNA vaccine opposition are claiming the vaccines themselves are creating. More to the point, whereas our overabundance of highly enriched uranium is a source of economic opportunity for the establishment of a stronger nuclear presence in our quest for “greener” energy alternatives, this government STILL will not address the need for safer methods of enforced utilization of this product in the development of electricity, nor will it create a policy that would allow for the research of methodologies that would recycle the dangerous byproducts of this form of electrical generation.

Regulation and better concern for our environment have long shown that we require a more “thinking” form of government to conduct the affairs of our economic futures. The Sask Party would have you believe that such obstruction holds us back from our economic potential, when in fact it is the failure of our governments to foresee the potential of future economic expansion or deny such opportunity to placate the lobbying concerns of industry unwilling to invest in the rejuvenation of their own existence as viable products for our future utilization. 

These small steps should be a part of the Saskatchewan Party’s desire to govern for our future after Oct. 28. Why Scott Moe can’t see that is a question I suspect people will be asking with increasing frequency come that date, and why we might finally see the end of their debt-plagued reign.

Are Moe and Smith now planning a 2024 election show-down with Ottawa?

Ken MacDougall
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Are Moe and Smith now planning a 2024 election show-down with Ottawa?

Were it not for the CBC, I probably wouldn’t even begin to know the number of truly weird and wonderful contortions that Scott Moe regularly goes through in trying to convince voters that only he and our “Saskatchewan First Act” can protect us from the overreaching attempts by Ottawa to control the outcome of our future prosperity. Now, in a fashion typical of his government’s aversion to creating legislation that would provide some meaningful response to climate change’s damaging effects upon our economy, he and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith are charting their anti-Trudeau militia’s next resistance move to be on the front lines of the federal government’s amended Clean Power Grid’s regulations, a verbal war that will only exacerbate this stupidity.

Few of us, overly concerned about grocery chains still gouging us over food prices or housing costs reaching ever skyward, currently have precious little time to formulate an opinion as to how we should be tackling these problems, much less those associated with climate change. The Moe government, only too happy to play upon our “ignorance by prioritization of personal need”, pretend that they’re also “concerned” as to the typical consumer’s plight. They only add to our concerns that whenever someone might suggest (such as Kaitlyn Harvey, who became an NDP candidate for the provincial caucus when Ryan Meili resigned that position) that the two issues are one and the same. That is, unless they can put up a credible argument to suggest that whatever “changes” should be taken in such a direction, particularly if suggested by the feds, could only result in major economic damage to the province’s economy.

This battle’s first skirmish occurred last August when the federal government released its proposed Clean Electricity Regulations, which in essence articulated how Ottawa wanted our national electricity grid to function while transitioning to its goal of obtaining a “net zero green energy” result starting in 2035. As could be expected, both Alberta and Saskatchewan reacted to the document, first maintaining that these new rules did not take the provinces’ specific requirements, needs and limitations into effect when drafted. However, even as the federal government gave assurances that such modification to policy would be studied in a more updated plan to be released this year, both Premiers Scott Moe and Danielle Smith went full “sovereignty”, maintaining that even if such changes could be made, they first would never be quite “enough” in their revision to allow such regulations to overshadow the provinces’ right to govern the electrical grid’s deployment and utilization as per constitutional arrangement, in effect rehashing the irrelevancy of arguments made by the provinces to support their passage of the Saskatchewan First Act and Alberta’s Sovereignty Act.

Lacking any substantive evidence to back its claim, the Saskatchewan government established a committee, the “Economic Impact Assessment Tribunal” to perform that very task. Backed by research done through Navius Research Inc. of Vancouver, and supported by extensive documentation emanating from the Ministry of Finance and the Crown Investments Corporation (CIC). In May, this Committee published their report, suggesting among other things that:

  • Any regulatory change carries with it some unintended consequences, including undermining investor confidence, a point which may be relevant were we talking of some sports arena going to another jurisdiction should local government not take into consideration such loss and govern accordingly; however, in this case this issue is irrelevant, given that without consideration of the need to act, climate change will in the long run create economic chaos world-wide;
  • The costs of electricity to Saskatchewan families, business and industry will be greater under the Clean Energy Regulations (CER) than under the Saskatchewan Affordability Plan (SAPP) for the period from 2025 to 2035; however, this assumption is based upon three questionable levels of data reliability, not the least of which is documentation emanating from the Ministry of Finance, which relies heavily upon hugely optimistic projection of royalty wealth continuing to be derived from our resource sector, and especially from oil extraction. It also pessimistically jumps to some questionable and negative conclusions, specifically that the implementation time for CER regulations to come into effect may be too short for some province, technology to allow for a smooth transition may not be ready in time and that a “reliable” labour source will be available to conclude work in time to meet the schedule of the CER;
  • Saskatchewan’s economic growth (GDP) will be about $7.1 billion lower and at least 4,200 fewer jobs under the CER than under the SAPP from 2025 to 2035, but both figures drive my mathematics teacher brain to distraction. Of course, the CER figures will be lower than SAPP’s; the time line is shorter
  • Finally, one can expect the price of electricity to increase. That’s going to happen, whether under CER or SAPP; however, the bizarre list of economic “consequences” makes their report again sound like Saskatoon is bidding for another NHL franchise, with the energy equivalent being the standard for why corporations used to frown upon union involvement: the potential shift of production and increased “deindustrialization” to jurisdictions with weaker environmental standards, reduce opportunities to partner with Indigenous entities (How? Is the Saskatchewan government going to FINALLY recognize that our Indigenous communities should be receiving funds from royalties associated with natural resource extraction? Please…), and our reliance on being an export-based economy makes Saskatchewan and its industries “particularly vulnerable to the consequences of greater electricity costs – which are going to be better controlled in Saskatchewan in any case, simply because such jurisdictional control lies within the power of our Crown controlled industries

With the revision of the CER’s proposed regulations only now being released by the federal government, even Alberta’s concern that the CER’s timelines do not take into consideration the fact that most of their electricity is created by using natural gas generation is neutered by there now being some “wiggle room” into creating a date for full implementation of CER in the province. However, that is still not stopping Dustin Duncan. Saskatchewan’s minister responsible for Crown corporations, and once one of the saner members of Scott Moe’s Cabinet, is now maintaining the premier’s position that “No tweaks or adjustments can adequately address the fundamental flaws in these regulations.”

I wonder if anyone hoping to still be around at the end of October and as part of a Saskatchewan Party government actually believes the premier’s rhetoric, or does their sudden decision to march lock step with Emperor Scott have nothing to do with having lost his clothing, but whether Premier Moe has cut off their access to the Weather Channel.

MLA’s reports illustrate ongoing indifference to P. A.’s changing needs

Ken MacDougall
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MLA’s reports illustrate ongoing indifference to P. A.’s changing needs

Ever since former NDP MLA Lon Borgerson suggested that our local MLA’s and MP be restricted from utilizing the vehicle as an opportunity for them to campaign, our local MLA’s reports have actually become readable. In their May 15th and 17th submissions, both Joe Hargrave (P.A. Carlton) and Alana Ross (P,A. Northcote) stick to the “facts” of the government’s legislative progress, even offering up hints as to progress and expectation of completion of a task, and providing a welcome “plus” in informing the public how much is being spent on these items.

However, even with such improvement of information flow, given that we are now at the mercy of governmental policies that run counter to mainstream notions of progressivism and “improvement”, it’s my feeling that our media should now be spending more time in monitoring the progress and success of such programs, as opposed to the antics of those who have put such ideas into play. 

Unfortunately, the machinations of the politicians themselves often take away from the idea of monitoring the performance levels of their legislative efforts. Last week, you may recall, the Speaker of the House, Randy Weekes, himself a Sask Party MLA, took the last day of the current sitting to reflect upon the behaviour of his caucus, in particular Meadow Lake MLA Jeremy Harrison, towards their “treatment” of the Speaker and government employees with whom they worked on a daily basis. Asked to comment upon Speaker Weekes allegations regarding Mr. Harrison, Ms. Ross chose to deflect such criticism by without referring to Harrison, but rather focusing upon the positivity of cordiality she received as an MLA. Not particularly surprising, Premier Moe instead offered up only snivelling contempt of Weekes’ allegations, referring to the Speaker as a “sore loser” for having lost the October candidacy nomination to Kindersley newcomer Kim Gartner, leaving no doubt in the public’s mind that despite Weekes’ 24 years of service to his riding and the Party, Moe’s objective over the next few weeks of damage repair will be to try and do everything in his power to delegitimize the Speaker’s resume.

Unfortunately, the premier’s remarks immediately indicated that Ms. Ross’s reserved comments were not going to be the Party’s approach to Mr. Weekes’ allegations; however, this nod of appreciation to her taking a more kindly route in critiquing her May 17th Report does not keep me from denoting the serious weaknesses highlighted by the SP’s even favourably viewed accomplishments on record, particularly in the areas of competence as a health care worker and nurse Ms. Ross has practised, before entering the savage arena of politics.

In her describing the massive changes that are now being made to the operational capacity of the Victoria Union Hospital, Ms. Ross and Northcote and Carlton voters should be reminded that over twenty years ago, in shutting down operations at the second hospital on Sixth Avenue East, the Calvert NDP caucus warned of such changes already being required, as the structure leaked dangerous asbestos fibre insulation into the environment, making the building unsafe for both staff and patients. Now with the Vic enhancing much-needed laboratory, operating capacity and over 200 new patient beds, she has failed to address questions of future vital interest to themselves, such as where are the extra health professional bodies going to come from in fully staffing the hospital once it opens. Will we finally be rid of the need to wait as long as three weeks for routine blood work or a simple radiology procedures to be performed, and, most importantly, who are the specialists who will now be afforded extra operating time, when we neither have enough specialists here in Prince Albert or a program that will eventually provide such critical needs?

In also including steps being made in tackling equally critical social issues such as low-cost housing ($3.7 million for 12 “affordable” housing units), another “$42.6 million over the next three years to deliver critical support and services to those impacted by violence and abuse”, and $800,000 to the Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Community Response Fund” to support similar work in the most vulnerable of our Indigenous communities”, Ms. Ross has succeeded only in highlighting what are but four of the province’s most depressing and critical issues of concern for which this government has no “cure”. Speaking to our housing needs alone, we also need homes for middle income earners to buy or rent, and bury the types of NIMBY-ism we have just witnessed when Calgary’s Council voted to implement block rezoning so as to qualify for new federal housing monies.

Mr. Hargrave’s May 15th Report requires an equal savagery, if only for exacerbating already critical social issues by their implementation. For instance, allocating $617.1 million for the operation, maintenance, building and improving our highways may benefit may improve the highway between Regina and Weyburn as but one objective, but HOW and WHERE are the $73.5 million in funds going to be prioritized in a nebulous structure such as to build, operate and maintain “the” transportation system in northern Saskatchewan demands an explanation as to WHAT this phrase is even describing. For instance, does it FINALLY include Prince Albert getting its second bridge finally built?

Who knows?

There’s also $719.4 million going to the Ministry of Corrections, Policing and Public Safety for increased RCMP operations and their First Nations Policing Program. Nothing, however, is mentioned as to how these monies will be used to combat our increasingly deadly drug distribution being created by major gang networks in Canada’s major cities, or whether there will be increases to funding rehabilitation programs, at least for first time offenders or those requiring treatment for addiction or propensity towards violence. 

However, our harried taxpayer base will be pleased to note that 160 new municipal police and 17 Combined Traffic Services will be giving out tickets to help pay for these services.

If we want to have the public vote with “knowledge” come October, 2024, we not only have to have knowledge as to the SUCCESS of programs initiated by the provincial government for the past two decades. The fact is, no matter what types of plumage the Sask Party tries to put on its budgetary efforts, their solutions have yet to reach the cause requiring repair by such legislation. Among others, these include the fact that we have to stop listening to the lobbyists from Big Oil or Big Agra.

Our concerns should not just provide for infrastructure that will allow increased export-bound product, but include programs that will have to be created as a result of our delay in addressing climate change and global weather issues, but food sustainability, the annihilation of the “small” producer due to the “efficiency” of larger market share, destabilization of our northern forest areas through clearcutting and failure to reclaim these lands through reforestation, planning road access to the north so that we can better monitor the industrialization efforts of the forestry industry and our new mines’ environmental practices.

Only making things worse for Prince Albert residents, we are still reluctant to demand that the Sask Party cease and desist their crass and classless program for the sale of Crown lands in the north.

The future wealth of Prince Albert must come from that north, and that land’s exploitation that will invariably result from such lack of regulation only has the future capacity to drown us in its inevitable toxicity. In short, our “second bridge” isn’t the only item missing from May’s MLA Reports…

Poilievre’s campaign rhetoric now pushing our Pavlovian buttons

Ken MacDougall
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Poilievre’s campaign rhetoric now pushing our Pavlovian buttons

I’ve often wondered why it is that Canadians always seem to end up wanting a single party in power whenever a minority government is demanded by the electorate. As it now stands, we’ve recently gone through a period during which the NDP, knowing full well that an agreement with the Liberal Party to work in tandem on progressive legislation might eventually be used against them in the future, went ahead and did just that. What Canadians have now reaped as a result of this co-operative effort is some of the most sought-after progressive legislative programs voters have been asking for decades that government provide, including affordable day care, PharmaCare and DentiCare, all now cluttering the mind of the humorless Pierre Poilievre as being “obstacles’ to our ability to deal with the more oppressing economic issues now plaguing the majority of Canadian households. 

The problem is, whenever Poillievre takes the stage to criticize Justin Trudeau and the Liberal / NDP coalition, his audience suddenly sits up, alert as were Pavlov’s dogs hearing the bell announce the arrival of their next meal, to salivate at the prospect of getting closer to a time in 2025 when they will feed upon the carcass of our PM. This in turn appears to send that voter segment into an almost hypnotic trance, their analytical functions cease, and whatever implication as to the potential for good or harm emanating from Poilievre’s monologue vanishes, sucked back into the black hole of 18th Century political rhetoric from which it was sourced. 

None of this rhetorical behaviour is “new” to us; it’s the same approach that Stephen Harper took in 2015 trying to stave off the comeback of a Liberal Party driven almost to extinction during Harper’s period as PM. Equally Harper-like, no utterance by Poilievre is “contaminated” by any policy statement that might give us some idea as to what direction a potential Conservative government might take us. 

OK, maybe that last bit about there being no “policy” being expressed isn’t 100% accurate. For instance, we know that the Conservative’s “solution” to climate change is to “axe the tax” in the provinces whose governments were too addicted to their resource-based royalty revenue to tamper with the restraint necessary to that they couldn’t generate a plan to curb such change

Hey, we even know that a lot of comedians, not to mention federal civil servants are going to find themselves gainfully unemployed in 2026. I suppose that critics of my point of view could state with sincere “conviction” that such a policy shows “courage” in Poilievre’s words, simply because his riding’s constituents are almost overwhelmingly federal government employees. For me that’s a bit of a “stretch”. Canadians are now increasingly being sold on the merits of being part of a union; moreover, it flies in the face of a Conservative talking point that maintains that their party now speaks for the majority of the labour movement, a questionable refrain that Canada’s organized labour movements are only now starting to address.

For myself, Poilievre’s approach on the labour issue alone is the one that should have been referred to as “wacko” in Parliament, but let’s go with the word “delusional” for the moment. The fact is, the combined efforts of the Liberal and NDP coalition are producing legislative measures at a rate that’s making the Conservative bench nauseous and totally incapable of responding with any form of a measured critique. For instance, the latest budget presented before Parliament on housing alone is being criticized for its temerity in basically telling provincial governments that the money is there for the taking, PROVIDED that you agree to certain terms such as containment of urban sprawl and zoning reform – but if you don’t, well, there’s always municipalities that urgently need such funds. 

The Conservatives also had a housing “plan” that was “similar” to the one presented by the Liberal / NDP coalition, but lacked some of the more inflation-restricting qualifications proposed in that budget, such as refusing to cave in to the NIMBY wealthy opposed to denser zoning, more access to public transit, “15 minute city” planning that minimized the need for personal vehicles, and restrained the ability of land speculators and “seven per cent solution” realtors to drive up the eventual cost of such new housing to even middle class families with both parents employed outside the home. 

Scott Moe and Danielle Smith have construed these restrictions as being infringements upon provincial responsibilities; however, does this also mean that they’re going to turn their backs upon federal monies made available on Wednesday that addressed environmental issues such as wildfires, enabled province to train more firefighters, and gave Indigenous communities greater control over land and resource management? 

I also find the Conservative criticism of a massive increase in the funding of our military, both in terms of recruitment and equipment, both hypocritical and self-serving, in that former PM John Diefenbaker started the government trend of purchasing throw-away American- manufactured military equipment when he dumped the Avro Arrow in favour of Bomarc missiles, while Harper refused to replace rescue helicopters or commit to the purchase of the F-35 Lightning fighter aircraft, which Canada has now done, as well as replacing its Aurora maritime patrol fleet with the newer P8-A’s.

And so, yes, the Conservatives can rightly point to our now having a $40 billion deficit, but much of that was created as a result of measures required to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic; therefore, WHY in God’s name would Poilievre now turn towards debunking the need for our three majorly demanded program implementations that will in the near future provide many of the social fixtures needed for our economy to more productively function?  Perhaps we should be instead asking our Pavlovian-impaired voters why they’re still listening to this man, especially when we know that here in Saskatchewan, we have a provincial deficit now approaching $31 billion…

Poilievre’s “Trudeau” obsession ignores reality

Ken MacDougall
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Poilievre’s “Trudeau” obsession ignores reality

It would seem as though the entire “conservative movement” has developed a new malady currently incurable by even m-RNA vaccine-related research, that being something I would call “media shingles”, were such an ICDA code become known to our medical practitioners. It is certainly evident that Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre suffers from such affliction, what with his thin-skinned retort to the “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” comedian who has on more than one occasion tried to get His Angerness to just “lighten up” a tad. 

The reality of former PM Jean Chretien actually lapping up such teasing by writing even “meaner” jokes about himself in his own speeches notwithstanding, has anyone of late even noticed that the entire agenda being spewed by Poilievre et Co. is laden with U.S.-style political discussion that the Conservatives find easier to use than explain how they relate to a Canadian democracy, much less engender party policy agenda laden with anti-Canadian sentiment utilizing Justin Trudeau as Public Enemy Number One? 

In particular, what’s with their determination to “defund the English portion of CBC”, other than it is now a “tradition” that Reform-minded MP’s masquerading as actual “Conservatives” express their displeasure of “Mother Corp”, just because their Canadian content shows, particularly those of a comedic persuasion utilize their own words as part of their regular joke monologues. 

Mind you, these same Reformers have also on occasion allowed their anti-bilingual sentiments to go public, but they only want to defund the English component because in their jaded minds they believe that since most “true Westerners” can’t stand listening to French, much less reading it on their canned preserves labels, no one out “our way” (i.e.: the West) will care if Radio Canada is still be available on cable or satellite, because no one watches it, anyway.

Seriously, though, can someone PLEASE explain how the personable AND intellectual Andrew Chang or Ian Hanomansing “offend”? Give it a rest; I know dozens of women who want to believe that Ian’s last name is actually “Handsome Man Thing”. That affection by itself is fully capable of raising blood pressure levels with the Conservative ranks, especially when someone decides to “remind” them how on January 29, 1970 their entire caucus teased the PM during Question Period when Barbra Streisand entered Parliament’s public gallery, caught the eye of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and pointed to her watch to indicate that HE was “late” for their evening’s date. 

Such feelings of political recognition and affection, however, have long been stripped from the Conservative Party’s message honed during the Harper years. To him, the Liberals were a political force to be vanquished, not respected, and their sins promulgated upon westerners, particularly the National Energy Program, were never to be forgotten. Equally repugnant to our current crop of ex-Harperite Reformers, Streisand’s feelings towards the younger Trudeau expressed when she and now husband James Brolin visited Justin shortly after his father’s death, only to later comment that “I felt sad and happy at the same time, because it was very moving to be there with his son;…he’s kind, he’s compassionate, and he cares more about the people than the corporations. Pierre would have been so proud of him.” 

In so speaking, Ms. Streisand has voiced the true reason for Poilievre having nothing to say policy-wise, save that the younger Trudeau is now a “wacko” – and “extreme” to boot. Justin is our PM because women, DESPITE Stephen Harper’s constant efforts to paint the younger Trudeau as “unprepared” for the job of PM, put him in that role, and might do so again in 2025. This may sound perfectly absurd at the moment, especially when the Conservative flak machine is drooling over poll projections contemplating 210-plus seats going their way in 2025. Given the unpopularity of the Moe regime at the moment and voters now starting to yawn at Poilievre’s constant ranting, I can foresee the possibility of the Conservatives being of serious good fortune to take even 14 seats in the province, with another 3 also being vulnerable, especially Andrew Scheer’s riding, should the Indigenous communities in that riding decide to vote in block for an NDP candidate, knowing full well that no Liberal will ever see the inside of Parliament coming from Saskatchewan, at least for the next 10 or more years.

And having stated such “blasphemy”, I will return to the point of explaining “why” it is that there has to be a voice of dissent – even if it’s mine – expressing the sorrow of watching our democratic nation potentially ending up pursuing the autocratic vision espoused by the Conservative Party.

Personally, I could care less as to what Conservative or Sask Party “insiders” criticize what I write; every Canadian has such a right, irrespective of whether they come from “small town” Prince Albert, Calgary, or “The Big Smoke”, as Toronto is called. It took me less than three HOURS from the time I walked into the Dalhousie Gazette (Halifax) office in 1971, bored and looking for something to do between classes to doing a “nose plant” in front of Pierre Trudeau simply because the then-PM met myself and six other sheepish Dal students being escorted out of the Hotel Nova Scotian by a 6’8” member of his RCMP security team, and I was dropped at his feet in rather embarrassing fashion. As a result of this introduction, I now miss being a journalist of sorts, freelancing for four years with the CBC to pay my tuition, being taught how to “do the trade” by luminaries such as W5’s Andrew Cochrane, and writing the stories and doing the research that ended up getting two of my stories onto the front pages of almost every major newspaper in Canada. 

To our jaundiced “conservative” critics, that sounds like bragging; however, being part of a community that wanted to tell Canada’s stories was once a dream profession, that is, until monopolistic ownership and profit before story-writing were the mottos of editorial rooms strewn across our landscape. In truth, today’s printed media are prominently the domain of ultra-rich shareholders promoting a political philosophy that is borders on the autocratic, and making the articles embarrassed reporters have to write as though they were mere stenographers.

Such conditions within our media sources cause me to ask questions that on the surface appear “going against the grain” of current conventional feelings respecting the Conservatives and their out-of-control leader. Why should anyone pay attention to stories created by Poilievre’s all-consuming insults about Justin Trudeau, when he has nothing to say about policy, save that it’d be something other than Trudeau’s. He openly courts the votes of former Freedom Convoy leadership considered to be members of Diagolon, a right-wing and anti-Semitic group considered by U.S law enforcement agencies to be a terrorist organization – with one such individual even harboring thoughts of sexually assaulting Poilievre’s own wife; Jean Chretien, on the other hand, would have turned that man’s face into sausage meat. He runs a campaign which uses rhetoric from the extreme “right” of the U.S. Republican Party, promoting constitutional change that would sap the power of our federal government and turn our provinces into Mississippi or Alabama Norths. And then there’s that “carbon tax” thing, which farmers really don’t want to talk about, simply because they’re more worried about droughts, wildfires, crop destruction, and – of course – climate change and its increasing influence upon our environment because we’ve become addicted to utilizing the products that Big Oil keeps wanting to provide for us.

Poilievre’s apostles are no different in their ignorance, promoting insane theories as to “why” m-RNA created Covid-19 vaccines are killing babies or making teenagers sick with myocarditis symptoms, when they don’t even realize that this rigid and exacting process that allows m-RNA messenger to replicate cellular structure so that life as we know it can be preserved in our genetic constituency. Equally repugnant, they can wax eloquently as to the “Communist China” influence upon potential Liberal candidates, yet are only too willing to dispute the evidence that most of their political opinions are being pushed to their extremes by Russian hackers and disinformation specialists.

Right now, however, our friends and neighbours to the south are starting to again give Justin Trudeau the same form of audience he once enjoyed when Barack Obama was President. For instance, when the PM suggested that the Prime Minister of India may have had some role to play in the assassination of a prominent Sikh dissident in Vancouver, our right-wing media – and premier Scott Moe in particular – lambasted the PM over his callous disrespect and contempt for India in general, and its value to our nation as a trading partner. Now, U.S. intelligence experts are viewing with some alarm what appears to be a very active campaign by India’s leadership to repress any efforts by offshore activists to promote Sikh independence. In the same fashion, Poilievre has vowed to remove the odious media “supplement” resulting from Bill C-18, The Online News Act’s goal of having social media platforms provide compensation to Canada’s print media sources for sharing their stories online, and losing ad revenues as a result. Now, even California governor Gavin Newsom, having in 2022 enacted legislation to protect people from online dissemination of hate and disinformation, is now proposing the same measure as compensation for the work provided by the reporters creating stories of such importance.

Will either of these American turnarounds quiet the rhetoric Poilievre is so wont to spread?

I’m more inclined to interpret this question in the following fashion: Are Canadian voters so consumed with hate and conflict that they’re actually seemingly prepared to unleash over 200 zealots into Parliament whose voices sound more and more like those on the extremist “right” levels of the American “evangelical” and profit over the future advocates selfishly promoting their own “virtues” over the obvious needs for consultation on mapping our future social agenda? 

God, I hope not; however, with Poilievre, nothing will change, simply because the Conservative Party is bereft of policies that promote cooperation and consultation between our various levels of government.

For me, that sucks, big time…

Ken MacDougall is a former journalist and teacher.

Reading for knowledge acquisition a lost art on any media platform

Ken MacDougall
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Reading for knowledge acquisition a lost art on any media platform

Every morning my Inbox is filled with news articles – the Herald, Toronto Star, Washington Post, CBC, Globe & Mail, The Tyee, CNN, and even the Western Standard, the last refuge of unilingual opinionators still resenting that their careers ended when on February 13, 2015 the SUN News Network disappeared from our television screens. 

I regularly scan their contents looking for stories dealing with “progressive” issues, even if the story takes a “negative” bent (i.e.: anti-progressive) in its writing. What I read, however, is too many reporters answering the “what” component of their “Who, what, where, when” and particularly “why?” questions, when the “why” is THE essential component in pursuing a story and writing something that might even give some “hint” as to why this event even occurred in the first place. This reporting reticence, unfortunately, is an economic problem, as opposed to its reporter not being able to properly perform his/her reporting obligations.

“Bottom line” pressure” is nothing “new” to newspaper chains, however. Recall that Margaret Thatcher “made her bones” by taking on the press unions in England faced with major lay-offs due to their parent companies having to replace printing presses built in the late 19th Century and confiscated from Germany following the Great War as reparation.

Canada’s newspapers have been facing similar “pressure” since the 1960’s, but from different directions. First off, we were increasingly relying upon news chains owning too many papers. Unfortunately, the political leanings of such ownership invariably creates pressure upon “downstream” editorial staff to “tone down” any possible opposition to the ideas fomented by its political favourites, resulting in most stories involving confrontation between political agendas ending up being slanted towards politicians with the more right-wing philosophy, or being written without any “why” factor influence, much as would have been written by a stenographer.

Here in Canada, no entity has taken more advantage of this so-called “legitimate” media political leanings than our Conservative brethren and the party’s current leader, Pierre Poilievre. Following the presentation this week of the federal budget, Poilievre’s usual diatribe normally spewed about the “evils” of a Justin Trudeau-led government was suddenly sucked back into the vacuum from which it was first recovered, as it became immediately evident that the Conservatives weren’t expecting such a forceful response to Canada’s housing crisis (and military readiness spending), which is now being put forward very late in their mandate, mind you, but being dealt with, nonetheless.

It has always been part of the eventual Conservative agenda that, should they come to power in 2025, their only certain policies are to “cut, cut, cut” (Dot Black, The Rainmaker, 1997) in order to reward the same type of carpetbaggers to whom Poilievre and Conservatives increasingly owe fealty. As a result, Poilievre has now changed direction in his anti-Trudeau pouting presentations, and stressing the budget’s “inflationary” potential, all while maintaining much of this budget’s funding targets are matters normally managed by the provinces, and therefore infringe upon provincial jurisdiction.

Unfortunately, this revisionist approach is a specious and seriously stupid reason for questioning priorities and intent within the Liberal’s budgetary agenda. For Canadians who may have lost hope of ever being able to afford reasonable accommodation, this money is like manna. All that the provinces have to do is accept the terms for receiving such funding, including demanding municipalities to plan more “compact” residential- commercial zones so that current infrastructural facilities will not be stretched beyond their limits, and if they won’t the money will go directly to its municipalities. We all know that neither premiers Smith nor Moe won’t accept such terms, as they are beholden to land speculators (e.g.: the Regina Bypass) who are major contributors to their election coffers.

In any case, Poilievre’s emphasis upon a federal constitutional “obligation” to provincial rights arguments falls grievously short when one considers how our media either misrepresents or misinforms its public when presenting the contradictions that have already been aggrieved by the Saskatchewan government– and none of the major media streams have called out Poilievre, Smith OR Moe for their hypocrisy. 

As an example, violations of international law (train derailment resulting in toxic leaks affecting water and air quality across international borders, etc.) are not prosecuted against the province, but rather our nation (Recall January 16, 2023, when PM Trudeau visited the opening of the rare earth processing plant near Saskatoon). Equally sickening, the “Let them shop at Cameco” rhetoric first expressed by Brad Wall still holds water within Scott Moe’s party, making it sound as though Indigenous peoples should be treated as the far right now wants to treat our new and “excessive” immigrant population. 

So the question here is, “How do we return a sense of proper reporting within a credible media source that allows for the telling of a story that should be heard by all Canadians?” The answer is, “We don’t – UNLESS that media source can go “paperless” yet still reach the 2 million or more readership that used to buy the 250 page edition of the Saturday Toronto Star in the early 1970’s. 

I would dearly love to see the Herald finally able to put out a regular 36 to 48 page paper that covers everything of importance to Saskatchewanians, and using less “Op Ed” opinion pieces.

All this requires is that the average householder now buys an online subscription to the media outlet, and giving them access to a broader stream of interpretive coverage and critique of national and international events.

And guess what? Such subscriptions are “tax deductible”…

Smith, Moe’s “My football; I’m the quarterback” attitude sacked by federal housing strategy

Ken MacDougall
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Smith, Moe’s “My football; I’m the quarterback” attitude sacked by federal housing strategy

On rare occasions I wish that premiers Moe and Smith – and to a lesser extent Ontario’s Doug Ford – would stop being so predictable.

Mind you, it makes my efforts to create a column worth reading (in my estimation, anyway) a lot easier, but at the same time it makes the job even more difficult because I have to then try to find something pithy and original to include within its contents.

Take, for instance, the conversation in last week’s column focused upon Poilievre’s weakening polling numbers. Despite that omen, premiers Smith, Moe and Ford are still pursuing their “I hate Justin” theme by backing Poilievre in his constant complaining as to how (not “why”, unfortunately) the PM isn’t listening to Canadians.

Poilievre’s complaints run the gamut of social and economic unrest plaguing Canadians. To him, the federal government’s efforts to tackle affordability issues (including the dramatically rising cost of food) or deal with our housing crisis, while simultaneously pursuing a climate policy that includes imposing a carbon tax on the acquisition or utilization of petroleum products “just aren’t working”. 

Sometimes, however, I feel sorry for our wannabe future PM, for at times it seems that Poilievre never bothered to take any Canadian History classes (now weirdly referred to as Social Studies). Those of us over the age of 40 can recall when the Liberals were grudgingly called “the natural governing party of Canada.” That was in the era where Justin’s father, Pierre, was well known in western Canada for telling protesting farmers that they were “Number 1” in his book with that infamous middle finger salute.

In 2015 it took only microseconds Stephen Harper of ridiculing newly elected Liberal leader Justin Trudeau to get Canadians to think that maybe, just maybe, it might be time for a return to the good old days of Liberal pragmatism, no matter what residually negative feelings the electorate might still have regarding Papa Trudeau’s antics or bribery scandals.

A substantial portion of Canadian voters simply don’t trust Poilievre to do any better in managing our economy. When pushed to offer policy alternatives by our true media, he could only respond by either insulting the questioner or refusing to answer and suggesting that the scribe was merely interested in furthering the Liberals’ harmful agenda. So when the Liberals finally released their housing agenda prior to budget time, and followed it up with high profile visits to major population centres across Canada to promote its terms, the only response either Poilievre or the premiers of Saskatchewan and Alberta could offer was a now familiar type of protest, namely that once again, those damned federal Liberals were stomping all over the constitution by meddling in affairs that were specifically designated to be exclusively within the authority of provincial governments.

Any moderately informed Canadian knows from our historical confrontations between the federal government and provincial premiers knows that whenever the feds offer huge dollops of cash to deal with a universally plaguing issue, complaints by the premiers suddenly become whispers as they line up for their share of the coin. 

Not Scott Moe, though; last Friday he was attending a Prince Albert Chamber of Commerce Luncheon when he tore into the announcement that the feds would be creating a $6 billion “Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund”, $5 billion of which would be made available to the provinces, PROVIDED that they commit to using the monies to provide what are now being referred to as “missing middle” homes: duplexes, triplexes, townhouses, and multi-unit apartments. While scrupulously avoiding the threat of another “notwithstanding” bill about to hit the floor of the Marble Palace, Moe’s objections were specifically directed at the PM, noting that “This is an area of provincial jurisdiction, [and] I think more broadly, what we see with the federal government [acting in this manner] is a Prime Minister who is mistaking what his job actually is.”

Premier Smith was even more direct, almost immediately announcing the proposed creation of a “Provincial Priorities Act”, something that would ultimately prohibit any entity over which the province has jurisdiction from entering directly into any formal agreement with the federal government unless they first had the permission of the Alberta government. 

To be honest, both premiers appear to be immersed in writing a new script for a Monty Python spoof, OR as Wendy’s commercials once asked, “Where’s the beef?” The federal government, now knowing that the shortage of affordable housing is now a cross-Canada problem (and being constantly reminded of that fact by Poilievre) they have reacted with a peremptory fashion to tackle the problem head-on, and across provincial lines – which is their option, legislatively speaking. 

The issue fueling both Moe’s and Smith’s objections has nothing to do with constitutional boundaries defining federal or provincial obligations. By accepting the money the provincial governments must not only meet the well-defined criteria that determines how the money is to be used, but must also publicly acknowledge its source, a federal government long criticized for doing nothing to resolve public policy shortcomings, yet once again coming forward with tentative solutions of which the province has yet to think about or bring forward themselves.

What is simply hard to understand is why the Conservatives or anyone else can fight the inherent logic of this funding instrument. Not only does it address urban sprawl, it allows municipalities to now plan their future infrastructure based upon this constraint in land usage and therefore less cost. 

As CBC “At Issue” commentator Chantal Hebert noted this past Thursday evening, those not feeding off the limited oxygen supply in the Canadian political “bubble” are starting to see through this war of negative words being thrown at them by Poilievre and his supporters, and again are starting to see the Liberals as being the only party actually looking for “solutions” to their day-to-day concerns. This about-face SHOULD be worrying not only the Conservative Party hierarchy, but its myriad supporters in positions of power as well – but it’s not…

And that lack of vision and understanding is going to continue to hurt provincial quarterbacks such as Moe or Smith in the near future, who in staring at the scoreboard at the moment have taken their eyes off the defensive line-up that the “stupid” Liberals led by Justin Trudeau have adjusted in order to turn this political game around.

Why do Canadians want a man-child in the PM’s office?

Ken MacDougall
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Why do Canadians want a man-child in the PM’s office?

I love it when I can garner seriously good news from right-wing publications like the Western Standard.

In Thursday’s edition, one of their more prominent articles indicated that Pierre Poilievre’s CPC was actually DOWN 12 points (to the Liberals) in the latest polls. Please don’t get me “wrong” here; I am STILL not a Trudeau “fan”, but with Poilievre’s continuing attempts to portray the PM as being the reincarnate of all that is Canadian “evil”, his Reform-inspired membership continues to fail learning from the historical lesson they should have absorbed in 2015, that being “Don’t start treating Justin as though he’s a loser and idiot – even though you think he is.” 

Both Stephen Harper AND Tom Mulcair made that mistake in 2015. In the first leadership debate, CP reporter Murray Brewster noted that “in terms of performance…Trudeau [came across] as scrappy, eloquent and well-briefed.” Harper’s campaign was already going downhill faster than Canadian Alpine skier Cassidy Gray, but for the NDP’s Tom Mulcair so close to becoming our first NDP Prime Minister, this minute embracing of Harper-style sleaze campaigning was just too much for his fragile supporting base to withstand.

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre comes off as both a failed “apprentice” of Donald Trump’s and the Stephen Harper clone he truly is. In 2014 he drafted “The Fair Elections Act”, a bill so controversial and anti-democratic that Harper finally intervened in its legislative journey to radically amend its contents. Today, Poilievre’s “one size fits all” message is annoying – and boringly clear: blame Justin, embrace the anti-tax, anti-judicial reform, anti-progress and pro-corporate business practice that are the “go-to” offerings of a party obviously bereft of ideas.

Poilievre’s unflattering comparisons to Donald Trump’s man-child antics appear most frequently whenever mainstream reporters dare to ask him questions of which the public needs answers, and his unwillingness to offer alternative solutions to such items as climate change — where the Liberals are weak in defending their imposition of a carbon tax on petroleum usage — are leaving us all totally confused. Why, for instance, are we now calling the once-acknowledged “Climate Action Incentive Payment” a “Canada Carbon Rebate”? Are we being rebated the excess of what we’ve been charged for the usage of carbon-based fuel products while industry is finally being forced to reconsider its overdependence upon oil as an energy “solution”, or are we being bribed to accept back our own expenditures in a mediocre attempt by government to tackle a carbon gas pollution crisis that has created our global warming and climate change crisis? Come to think of it, what has the last three years of this tax imposition done to bring our nation’s emission rates down to zero?

As for the reaction of voters to this global crisis, we have to stop listening to second-rate hustlers trying to keep the petroleum industry from going into a death spiral, and perhaps on a Saskatchewan note, stop electing SARM officials offering questionable resolutions about what constitutes a “pollutant”, much less leaving out under what context such a definition can be applied. “Axe the tax” isn’t a solution; it’s just another way of expressing the reality that Conservatives are only prepared to support an industry that, like Boeing, long ago forgot its commitment to protect its end users from the potential harm their products might bring with them.

Our world-wide major problem has but one cure: produce something called “clean energy”. This essentially means that more monies must be invested in the arenas of fusion, while in the interim producing fission-based (nuclear) solutions that either leave less waste OR recycle the radioactive materials also littering the planet so as to curb the misgivings of a large public segment leery of the increased usage of uranium product and a ready source of such pollution. As for other types of energy potential, be they wind, solar or tidal, even though their potential to intermediately fulfil our energy needs continue to be challenged by Big Oil lobbyists, we have no choice but to enlist them in the services of resolving this potential planetary disaster. 

As for the “other” areas consuming Poilievre’s attention; American-based criminal expansion is creating the explosion of automobile theft world-wide, aided by the industry’s willingness to add “perk” gimmicks at inflated costs instead of improving the vehicle’s security apparatus. As for our judicial system’s many failures (of which a “catch and release” bail system is a minor blip), reform continues to be denied simply because Conservatives see only “punishment” incentives (i.e.: longer and mandatory sentences), and neither Liberals nor Conservatives being unwilling to provide necessary counselling or skill-training programs that have been proven to reduce recidivistic rates.

Ironically, Poilievre’s campaigning style is seriously weakened when Trudeau, as in his 2015 rejuvenation, fights back with policy responses that the public is only too anxious to listen to, even if not fully fleshed out in their application. For instance, the recent governmental release of billions of dollars to reduce housing shortages, particularly in the larger urban centres has now become a battleground for Premiers Moe, Ford and Smith, who instead of reaching for huge snow shovels to help deposit such monies into municipal coffers are now wasting our time and a potential resolution to this issue by lamenting the fact that the feds are usurping their “constitutional obligations” and ignoring their offices, while now being forced to listen to city planners offering solutions such as “15 minute cities” or the NIMBY bleating of wealthy suburbanites worried that a 20 storey affordable housing option might eventually appear within the sight of their Toronto-Bayview/Don Mills or Montreal-Outremont back yards.

In the meantime, Poilievre’s prickly personality continues to grate on the public nerve, even as he attempts to increase the size of his flock by courting the potential vote of Carbon Convoy leadership thugs airing sexually suggestive commentary about his wife, or threatening “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” CBC comedians Chris Wilson (playing Poilievre) or Mark Critch (playing Donald Trump) with job loss for their hilarious put-down of the two similarly styled politicians in their most recent sketch.

Obviously, Poilievre doesn’t have Jean Chretien’s sense of humor or love of such free publicity. And really, why should this man-child be worried about such portrayal? After all, it’s not as though Wilson could ever be mistaken for Poilievre, should they just happen to be in the same neighbourhood at the same time, is it?

Wait a minute; didn’t that already happen – in Halifax?

Water, water everywhere – but not for you to drink

Ken MacDougall
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Water, water everywhere – but not for you to drink

Having worked on a farm into late October while attending high school I learned very quickly how reverently “Spud Islanders” active in the agricultural sector treated having an adequate water supply both for their crops and the health of their communities. Unfortunately, such reverence does not appear to be shared by Saskatchewan farmers, or at least those who continue to support the Saskatchewan Party in its attempt to remain “the sole voice of rural Saskatchewan.”

Ever since the February 2018 contest called by the Sask Party to choose an heir to then Premier Brad “Runaway” Wall, water quality available to our farmland has remained a topic of little debate, but much concern. In the “Meet the Candidates” forum that took place in Melfort, candidates were asked how they proposed to deal with the potential for saline lake waters heavily contaminated with chemical runoff in the Quill Lake region draining into southern regional water sources such as Last Mountain Lake, a wetlands preserve and freshwater supply for Regina. Candidates acknowledged that the problem exists, but not one of the six candidates was prepared to discuss the issue at length – and the problem hasn’t been mentioned since.

Anyone driving up Highway 6 north of Highway 16 has noticed the frantic reconstruction of roadways threatened with water overrun due to water levels continuing to rise in Big, Middle and Little Quill lakes. The lake water levels rising are a direct result of a geographic irregularity in the region known as a “terminal basin”, meaning that rising water levels in the lakes have nowhere to go but overflow their shorelines. Moreover, the water now flowing into the lake system carries with it now dissolved and naturally occurring inorganic salts, which when combined with a loss of non-saline water due to evaporation during the summer months only increases the salinity levels in the three lakes. It should therefore be reasonably obvious that should this saline water continue to flow southward as it is now doing, this will eventually damage fisheries, wildlife habitat and water quality, not to mention the availability of agriculturally suitable land for usage by local farmers.

It’s not as if this terminal basin is a recently formed geographical phenomenon, so why is that in the most recent years (ironically, during the period in which the Sask Party assumed governorship of the province in 2007) this problem is only getting worse. As to finding a “solution” to this problem, our government should be obligated to at least explaining why it has become such a critical issue in these fifteen years – which of course it won’t for the simple reason that its urgency is being enhanced by the province’s Ministry of Agriculture’s abject failure to live up to the terms of something called the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, requiring the province to judiciously monitor and even to restrain our farming communities from turning wetland reserves environmentally housing our wildlife populations into arable lands. 

At the same time the province’s most recently presented budget sees Premier Moe determined to push through the development of several irrigational farmland initiatives utilizing Lake Diefenbaker’s resources as their starting point. Studies have shown that the lake has the potential to provide untold megaliters for it to work, but it would first have to be relocated in key “safe” delivery points (a deep coulee, for instance, capable of storing that water source and allow for the continuance of land irrigation even if the lake’s waters itself continue to remain “low”). 

While APAS President Ian Boxall and previous holders of that office may point to the reality that more water is lost in the lake due to evaporation, they are, along with Premier Moe, ignoring the reality that in the 1980’s farm soil samples showed that lands east of the lake were heavily polluted due to agricultural operations utilizing excessive amounts of fertilizer and chemical sprays. Since residual amounts of water already released to irrigate land invariably flow back down into the lake, the same potential for damage as is evident in the Quill Lakes region could eventually wind up polluting the lake waters so badly that existing fish and wildlife populations relying on these waters for survival – not to mention the tourist facilities located around the lake catering to fishing, boating and camping – would cease to exist. 

It would be a simple procedure for the government to provide services that would monitor for the potential creation of such situations, but given that its management of the Quill Lakes issues lacked any form of attention to environmental concerns, the premier seems to believe that the inevitable effects of gravity and our continued abuse of the land are but the overzealous quivering of environmental “extremists” for whom I may even “front” my writings, even though such a potential problem had previously been identified – by the CONSERVATIVE government of Grant Devine.

Were it not enough that the Sask Party has effectively failed to address the issues of management of our water supply – with even the Luddites at a recent Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities meeting passing a motion suggesting that carbon dioxide is NOT a “pollutant” (ocean water surveys are indicating that oxygen levels are plummeting as a result of it absorbing increasing quantities of this gas, and threatening fish populations in the process) – ignores a new “reality” in our world’s inability to understand what factors are essential to provide for the existence of mankind, that being new studies indicating that so-called “forever chemicals” (such as those that were used to create “miracles” for mothers struggling in the kitchen having to scrub pots and pans clean due to food sticking to their surfaces – hence the first of such contaminants being created in Teflon) are now being found in our cities’ water supplies (including Prince Albert), and that our water treatment plants have to be upgraded at substantial cost to assure our public of having a “safe” water supply.

To me, it is merely a sickeningly “amusing” perspective as to the increasing virulence of such health-related contaminants having only recently also been tied to the types of bizarre illness-related “issues” the anti-vaxxer fringe are identifying as being “caused” by individuals having received booster shots for Covid-19. 

And “No”, folks, Justin Trudeau isn’t bringing up these points in his latest fights with Pierre Poilievre over the carbon tax or some other policy that “unjustly” places impediments upon your “freedoms” – which apparently you believe your children should not have.

And neither is Scott Moe…and that, for me, is a real problem… 

Sask. Party polling numbers haven’t reached the basement

Ken MacDougall
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Sask. Party polling numbers haven’t reached the basement

There is nothing in the world that has me rolling out Alanis Morissette’s album “Jagged Little Pill” faster than being able to describe a news item as being “Ironic”. In this case, I’m referring to the “welcoming reception” given Premier Moe when he made his appearance at the Brier final to watch our Saskatchewan curling representative bringing back our trophy to its homeland. So as to keep the Morissette parallelism engaged here, “Don’t you think” our premier being booed at an event which rural Saskatchewanians literally devote time to watch either in person or on TV, is concerning for the Sask. Party? 

On the more humorous level one wonders what the crowd would be doing were that “rating”, proclaimed by a polling group lacking staff fluent in mathematics and statistical analysis training been below the 50 per cent barrier. However, let’s not get carried away by such thoughts of satisfaction (mine, at least), and instead turn to some more joyous news that FINALLY, one of Saskatchewan’s more read journalists, Murray Mandryk, has had his cataracts removed, at least the ones that were blurring his political vision (i.e.: the ones that have of late been keeping him from seeing things the way I do, which is how it was in the “good old days” when I first started reading his columns). 

Almost four years ago, “The Man” had already pronounced that the NDP would lose the 2024 election by a substantial margin because it continued to not relate to rural concerns. Contrast that statement with what he has to say about the Saskatchewan Party following the Brier BooFest in his March 12th Leader Post column. He’s now concluded that the Saskatchewan Party is becoming increasingly irrelevant to voters for a very simple reason: “It keeps doing and saying unpopular things and It ignores critics that point that out and browbeats anyone even mildly critical or questioning”, and rounding it off by noting that “Over time, a government tends to further insulate itself from the growing unwanted noise by instead listening to those whose livelihoods depend on doing whatever the powers that be tell them to do.”

That’s almost as good as how I would have written my “take” on this matter.

The first of many incidents that Mandryk’s column brought to mind was the July of 2022 appointment of former Sask Party MLA, Reform MP and participant in the “Wexit Movement” Allan Kerpan and Lyle Stewart, now retired SP MLA for Thunder Creek to act as co-hosts for “in-house meetings” about increasing Saskatchewan “autonomy” (read: “Finding more ways to blame the Sask Party’s many policy failures and inactions upon the federal government”). 

Since that “meeting of the minds”, the SP has passed two pieces of legislation, the Parental Rights Act and the Saskatchewan First Act, both of which will eventually be deemed unconstitutional. These “acts” are classic creations of political minds begin to fray when they become hooked on generic Viagra trying to convince voters that they are “strong”, and thus able to “protect” us from the preeminent dangers of federal “overreach” by PM Justin Trudeau. 

Now with the SP’s popularity having plummeted some eight per cent over the last six weeks and the polls indicating the increasing likelihood of the NDP coming to power in the expected October election, Premier Moe has “borrowed” his rhetorical themes to focus upon another issue of confusing nature, that being the federally imposed carbon tax. In this capacity, he has seen fit to once again mimic the orations of Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre in highlighting the upcoming increase in the carbon tax levy upon petroleum production and the inability of some homeowners to change over their winter heating needs from either oil or natural gas furnaces.

Over the past eight months or more Canadians have been slapped with an inordinate collection of industry-created factors (supply chain issues being among the many that should have already been remedied by an expanding economy but aren’t) creating inflationary pressures on all forms of commerce. Compounding this problem is a central bank policy of hiking interest rates to “curb” inflationary pressures that potentially could result in foreclosure for homeowners already in over their heads having bought overpriced new housing once thought to be “affordable” due to their being hidden by severely low interest rates.

With a public demanding that governments do something about affordability and housing needs (to which our increasing homeless population adds further pressure), “cutting taxes” has always been a topic to which conservatives turn whenever they see the opportunity, and as such, the increasing value of this tax presents itself as an ideal target to focus upon as creating major affordability issues. The problem is, governments are formed to deal with issues of concern in the public forum, and the tax’s levy was put in place to deal with a crisis rural residents are only now finally being convinced is “real”: climate change and its disturbing influence upon weather patterns and a rising temperature average across the planet.

There are, of course, other “taxes” that could be cut to lessen cost pressures upon harried Canadians, including the provincially applied 15 per cent upon petroleum purchases. However, were the provinces to take this pathway, it would inevitably have the effect of having the public turn its attention as to how these entities are handling their own financial concerns – and that’s somewhere Scott Moe definitely does NOT want to go, especially given his government’s current deficit of $30 billion. 

Adding to this theatre, Premier Moe is apparently also contemplating to have the province not even bother to collect the tax – which as usual means that the poorest of the poor and truly needy families will receive far less through the federal government’s “carbon tax rebate” program. 

Seriously, though, there are members of the Sask Party who are actually “hinting” that the party’s “comeback trail” should actually include their no longer collecting the tax, thereby “forcing” the federal Liberals to have Premier Moe “arrested” for violation of Canada’s tax laws. 

So, here’s a question just loaded with irony: “Could Scott Moe having to spend some time in one of our English-catered Crowbar Hotels propel his party back to power?” 

Try to shake the thought from your head by repeating this healing mantra: “$30 billion – and STILL growing…”  Just relax; the elevator’s still not reached the basement on the Sask Party’s polling numbers…

Economic reality raises its ugly hand

Ken MacDougall
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Economic reality raises its ugly hand

Having to keep up with rightwing perspectives on political issues these days can be tiring. It’s also occasionally amusing. Once in a while, however, they say something that makes perfect sense, even if it is something they should have thought about more than 15 years ago.

In this case I am referring to how previous generations of Saskatchewan Party trolls and MLA’s were contending that starting in 1992, former NDP premier Roy Romanow closed over 50 hospitals, leaving our rural health care system in turmoil. Suddenly (PA Herald, February 17, 2024, p. 6), along comes Canadian Taxpayer Federation columnist Gage Haubrich maintaining that the province is so deep in debt that if the Saskatchewan Party’s next budget does not create a surplus, we’re heading for a 1990’s scenario repeat when Romanow “was forced to take drastic measures” to deal with the Devine financial nightmare.

During the Romanow era, Haubrich maintains that “the government was in such dire straights” that their only course of action was to introduce radical “spending cuts and tax hikes.” Unfortunately, he still tries to sell his message by repeating the Sask Party’s campaign lie that “52 hospitals were closed or converted”, when in reality only 3 were closed (P.A.’s second hospital, due to asbestos contamination and two others due to shrinking populations and better facilities nearby), while the remainder had their facilities upgraded, were reopened and RETAINED their hospital status, and now provided government services that were first only found in our larger urban centres.

Haubrich also attempted to try to paint Romanow as the “typical tax and spend NDPer”, noting that his actions still resulted in his being forced to raise gas, business and provincial tax levels. However, pretending that the Sask Party’s fiscal woes were only starting to become concerning in early 2014 (when we were allegedly only $6 billion in debt) ignores two now well-known facts. First, in 2023 Haubrich maintains that the province had gradually “drifted” towards a $19 billion deficit (in actuality, it’s closer to $30 billion, which exceeds even Devine’s excesses), when in reality Romanow’s successor, Lorne Calvert, had left the Sask Party government of Brad Wall with surplus budgets. Still, Haubrich maintains that if retiring Minister of Finance, Donna Harpauer, were to leave her final budget in surplus country, this could eventually save the SP from extinction come October. 

In other words, reality is again raising its ugly hand, emphatically telling Haubrich “we’re already bankrupt.”

Premier Moe must know this, but by emphasizing marketing forays to such places as India, he can build even larger markets for Saskatchewan’s embattled farmers facing critical financial considerations. For instance, will the hope of increasing the export of lentils to the sub-continent’s market mean that they’ll have that increased tonnage available in a year where drought and expectation of hotter than normal summer temperatures may slash crop yields to minimalist levels.

As to his government’s decision to stop collecting carbon tax premiums on home heating fuels, and even possibly no longer relinquishing that tax to the feds but using it to stem the hemorrhaging of his own treasury, how does he intend to handle a public lashing back due to their no longer receiving much needed carbon tax rebates from the federal government?

Unfortunately, it now appears that the Sask Party is going to forget about every other matter on its agenda, including dealing with housing and affordability issues is to try and use child-based “concerns” and incorrect financial musings to enhance some form of public perception that they are still battling and “protecting” everyone from federal government overreach.

How this will be developed poses some seriously mind-blowing distortions upon reality they will have to get voters to swallow, including a continued painting of Justin Trudeau as “bad” and climate change “not supported by the facts.” They will then bend the conversation around towards having voters believe that protecting our children is a far more dangerous and laudable problem to address on the campaign trail.

The Saskatchewan “United” Party initiate this trend when during the Saskatoon Meewasin campaign their candidate maintained that hundreds of children have either died or been physically harmed by “the jab” (receiving Covid vaccinations). In Lumsden Morse, it was the party of “Karens” again upset that their children knew more of the meanings on the Planned Parenthood flash cards than did even these members of the “free love” generation. This introduction of child-focused challenges to parental authority have now led right wing media outlets such as the Western Standard to believe that we’re now involved in a “war on children”.

This child-driven war is focused upon two things: a parent’s “right” (actually, an obligation) to raise their children and provide moral leadership and “concerns” at what appear to be children being “groomed” by society, especially in schools, to accept the possible changing of sexual identity merely to overcome emotional conflicts they encounter on a daily basis dealing with their birth designations. 

Personally, I find the hysteria raised by children allegedly “wanting” to transform their sexual identity to another form, be it of the opposite sex or to consider themselves to be nonbinary as moderately insane. In our schools, it is bullying practices that almost always cause children to question their own sexual role in life, and yet even when they are finally satisfied with the changes that they’ve made in understanding their own sexual feelings, the problem still remains. Witness, for instance, the story of Nex Benedict, a non-binary 16-year-old student attending Owasso High School in Oklahoma. She/they were set upon by three girls in a washroom and severely beaten earlier in February, only to die the next day. Neither her friend accompanying her nor her satisfaction of being able to utilize they/them pronouns could protect her.

Even so, our rightwing parties will continue to ignore the inanity of their parenting concerns, while simultaneously failing to introduce them to the decisions they must make when they become adults. So, if you’re aged 18 to 30 and still think voting isn’t worth the effort, look forward to an ever-decreasing way to participate in the democratic process. It’s good to see people concerned about the province’s finances, columnist Ken MacDougall writes, even if their concerns should have been raised 15-20 years ago.  

Braying rhetoric turning off voters

Ken MacDougall
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Braying rhetoric turning off voters

Bill Maher, in a 2015 edition of his concluding editorial piece called “New Rules” suggested that were Blake Shelton (country and western musician/Republican) and Gwen Stefani (rocker/Democrat) eventually marry (which they did), it would require them to find “balance” within their political opinions, something neither Americans nor Canadians seem to perceive contributing to our political hate agenda, now in place for almost 20 years.

Viewers this week of CBC’s “Power and Politics” and CTV’s “Power Play” would have been witness to how this predicament still remains leaving the public – and their panel discussion participants – baffled as to what to think, following remarks made by PM Justin Trudeau and Leader of the Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, upon the government’s decision to relabel climate change rebates and introduce legislation that would address hate crimes and cyberbullying on our social media platforms.

Canadians in general seem to be unaware that we’ve just survived two years of economic chaos caused by the Covid-19 pandemic that the world, and the United States in particular, heavily influenced by then President Donald Trump, failed to immediately react to this viral plague until it was almost too late, thus further creating this atmosphere of hatred within our political ranks. It is only the result of a minority Parliament, restrained by the more rational voices electing members of minority ranking parties that could countermand the onslaught of American MAGA beliefs as reason why we’re still economically surviving, despite the machinations of various factions to allow inflationary pressures to increase and supply chains to be sabotaged by such influence.

Maybe I sound “optimistic”, or even politically “concerned” as to the prospects of success for progressive parties in Canada (Yup; definitely), but I want this form of Parliament to exist even after the 2025 federal election. Why in God’s name would we even want either one of these “major” party leaders to become our Prime Minister, when they’re already treating one another in an almost comical, if not WWE manner, with the election still at least a year away? More to the point, however, is why  are we attempting to emulate the disastrous political mayhem of the U.S.A., where a racist sexual predator, grifter, embezzler and loud-mouthed thug praising the name of Russian dictator Vladimar Putin is attempting to regain a presidency he embarrassingly lost in 2020?

Trump’s campaign is single-mindedly intent upon insuring that minority and youth voters alike will receive considerable resistance to having their right to vote recognized in November, 2024, simply because they were the deciding factors who assured his defeat in 2020. I’ve always been worried that there aren’t ENOUGH youth voters out there that could influence the more moderate component of society that slowly improving progressive legislation that respects the rights of ALL citizens, even those of the “American persuasion”, and vote accordingly. However, nothing could be more obvious as a tactic to minimize this influence than for the American right to bring back tactics used by Senator Joe McCarthy than pointing out how our entertainment and media personalities are “corrupting” today’s youth.

Prior to the Super Bowl, FOX Network talking heads Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity postulated that this “deep state”, in collusion with the NFL and Democrats, had initiated a “psyop” (psychological operation) wherein the Super Bowl would be “won” by the Kansas City Chiefs – at which time the Chiefs eventual NFL Hall of Famer Travis Kelce and “love interest” Grammy Award winner Taylor Swift would unleash her millions of “Swiftie” fans to endorse Joe Biden to still be President after the Nov. 12 election.

It is with good reason that the MAGA crowd could swallow this goulash whole. Swift has over a billion followers on her social media platforms, and in 2023 asked those followers to get registered and vote. This resulted in https://www.vote.org/ usage spiking over 1,200 per cent in the next hour and over 35,000 new voters registered that same day. While Kelce’s influential potential is not quite that stunning a force to reckon with, as for the MAGA football crowd, his having participated in commercials encouraging parents to vaccinate their children, as well as doing a commercial for Bud Light after transgender actress Dylan Mulvaney did her advertising video for the beer, both actions are considered “sins” within its tail-gating membership.

And so, you might ask, just HOW does this so-called American “influence” upon our political masters play out in Canada? Well, let’s get back to those two political discussions that took place on CBC and CTV earlier this week, and ask ourselves the question, “Just what were the political pronouncements made by both Trudeau and Poilievre that so dumbfounded both sides of the political discussion?

First, the Liberals decided to “relabel” carbon tax legislation from “Climate Action Incentive Payment” to the “Canada Carbon Rebate” because many Canadians haven’t the faintest idea as to “why” they are receiving this rebate. However, since neither party appears to be willing to tie this issue directly to youth voter increasing concerns as to how our government will address issues such as climate change or food sustainability, they do not “hear” their voices echoed in this chamber.

Equally concerning to youth is that whereas the Liberals were intending to introduce legislation dealing with hate language and youth victimization on social media platforms, Poilievre, even before seeing the proposed legislation (still unprepared by the Liberals) came forward heavily maintaining that such legislation would violate the right to free speech, and social media should not be constraining how people “express themselves” on these platforms. When it is full public knowledge that our youth, even under the age of 10, are most often the victims of social media bullying and violence, Poilievre’s statement on this matter even runs against its more explosive position that it is their “mission” to protect children by introducing questionable legislation such as the “Parental Rights Act”, as did Saskatchewan.

These topics will require further column discussion, and if not discussed in full by parents with their children or other youth membership, these two political “leaders” braying their rhetoric in increasing volumes of hate might eventually again turn voters away from entering the voting booth. It’s a serious mistake and defeat for democratic principles if they again take this position– both provincially in 2024 and in 2025, federally.

Children can recognize the dangers of dog whistles – Why can’t we?

Ken MacDougall
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Children can recognize the dangers of dog whistles – Why can’t we?

It really bothers me that the “average” teenager’s parents seldom integrate their child into a discussion on political “awareness”, let alone the role our economy may play in their future. Growing up in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, we ignored such events at our peril; locked in the grip of a Cold War with the USSR where to lose spelled Armageddon, “our side” fought an intellectual war wherein the contest meant that our weapons were nothing more than the basic principles of democracy pairing off against Stalinist-led nations preaching to an economic order based upon Stalin’s warping of the “Communist” theories of Karl Marx. 

Unfortunately, all that is required for us to properly embrace such principles is for a politician, wrapped in the clothing of narcissism and endowed with an ability to sell his self-serving counter-message to the gullible. Senator Joseph McCarthy was a master practitioner of the art of self-deception, taking Cold War rhetoric to new extremes when in February of 1950 he claimed that there were U.S. citizens working in government who indeed were “Communists”, later expanding that rhetoric to include those who worked in the arenas of entertainment and news – all today eerily being replicated by another narcissistic personality, Donald Trump.

Phrases such as “the Communist menace” are now classified as “dog whistles” Their purpose is to convince “true believers” in a cause’s objectives to retaliate against those they fear will destroy its purpose and intent. Such responses are usually benign, but there are others that even threaten the tenets of democracy or even the existence of humanity. For instance, following a 1964 alleged attack by North Vietnamese forces upon two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, American military commanders and ranking U.S. Republican politicians ominously predicted that this act could eventually lead to so-called “democratic states” such as South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, “falling like dominos” to oppressive Communist regimes. Even then Americans knew that South Vietnam was led by corrupt politicians owing allegiance only to army generals making huge profits from the opium and heroin drug trades. 

Now, instead of asking the questions back then, Americans are still asking, first, was that war worth the 58,281 American military personnel who died in the conflict, much less the 3.8 million in all, most of whom were non-military personnel caught in the crossfires of this skirmish? More to a now serious public concern, was this war literally guaranteeing heroin and opium gaining a stranglehold in the United States drug trade worth the now-evident result of individuals seeking even greater “relief” from scientific “improvements” to these drugs in the creation of OxyContin and Fentanyl?

Why anyone would even want to embrace the more subtle nuances of dog whistles is a question we have to start asking ourselves. The terms we utilize in Saskatchewan may seem benign, but their result is STILL to create social chaos. What’s even more relevant is that even people who should be paying greater attention to this matter, myself included, may not realize how detached our politicized warning signals have become. As an example, in June of 2020, my then 17-year-old niece dragged me downtown to attend a “Black Lives Matter” rally. It wasn’t just the dozens of teens attending the event that caught my eye; rather, it was triggered more by parents who’d attended this rally with their teenagers asking their CHILDREN to explain why the messages being delivered applied to them, when all that the adults could glean from the speaker’s words was the word “black” was being “interpreted” in a more racist form, “anti-white”, in some conservative media sources.

With such naivete being displayed at an inconsequential rally to raise social awareness as to the utilization of race as a reason to oppress, we have to now start recognizing the economic and social malaise rising from the fermenting discontent created by our usage of dog whistle terminology. For example, Premier Scott Moe is publicly “explaining” his government’s utilization of the word “protect” to mean shielding us from the ravages of federal government overreach, even as party trolls in rural Saskatchewan gleefully point to the formation of the Saskatchewan Marshal’s Service, in reality created to “fight” rural criminal activities and property damage created by “heavily armed and extremely dangerous” Indigenous gang members and drug addicts. 

What the Saskatchewan Party has failed to recognize for years is that economic malaise has also bred the continued evolution of gang growth. Ironically, this growth factor has itself been aided by dog whistles, wherein the devastation of their own community’s economic plight is perceived by many to be a result of a colonialist mentality imposed upon “their own”. Years later, that protectionist “appeal” to join with them in protecting “their own” have become its product’s victims. 

Indigenous communities are now exposing the hypocrisy of the gang leaders’ words; however, fearful of losing that influence, they now choose to punish their disillusioned deserters of the “cause” with a brutality so extreme that those fortunate enough to actually get away without physical harm will be looking over their shoulders in fear for years to come. 

Today, we are seeing the evolution of our youth recognizing the weak points of argument and substance we bring forward to address our “concerns”. We’re no longer protecting them from something evil and unwelcome, so much as like our own members of the “sexual revolution” we actually believed that penicillin would protect us from all evil, and gave no further thought as to where our actions might lead or the consequences we’d have to face were our perceptions of reality are found a trifle lacking.

Our kids have already outgrown us in their understanding as to what the future might hold for them were we to continue to fail to confront even the most elemental problems of racial tolerance, food sustainability and the need to bring our climate back from the brink of environmental disaster.

What is wrong with us in our failure to analyze our problems with such clarity? 

Government needs to listen to young voters

Ken MacDougall
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Government needs to listen to young voters

I grew up in the 1960’s, when if we didn’t know the meaning of certain sexually explicit terms; adults would tell us their meaning – to protect us. We learned the “difference” between a person being lesbian/gay versus being a pedophile, and we watched the evening news looking for some hope that sooner or later, the Cold War would end and we could finally shake hands with someone whose skin pigmentation was “different” from ours. 

It is therefore depressing to try to explain to our youth as to “why” many members of my generation have become the Luddites creating an artificial barrier to tolerance and progressive ideas.

Today, we pathetically jaywalk across a busy street to avoid encountering the homeless. We deny the reality of the ‘60’s when unions created our middle class and families could “get by” with only one person bringing home a pay cheque, instead allowing a Sask Party government weaned on American ultra-conservative stupidities and obsessions to pass “right to work” legislation that, mercifully, the Court condemned as unconstitutional. And now, even though the provincial election is still nine months away, we AGAIN have Sask Party trolls restarting their claim that the Romanow “socialist hordes” CLOSED 50 hospitals during their government tenure. 

Ironically, our long forgotten second hospital here in Prince Albert is on that “list”, but its “closure” had more to do with the fact the white particles covering patients, medical staff and the visiting public’s clothing wasn’t dandruff, but rather asbestos fibres. Today, let a teen from Shellbrook ask why it is that grandparents regularly stricken with respiratory ailments only recently found their hospital’s Emergency Room closed due to extreme staff shortages, and the answer they receive from their MLA – our Premier – is a deathly silence. Nothing changes, because we’re still being bombarded with 15-year-old fiction and little improvement of health care delivery to rural Saskatchewan.

Every day our kids bear witness to older family members turning to snorting, smoking, swallowing or injecting pain “killers” such as Fentanyl to ease their fiscally-based concerns, only later to having to identify their remains laid out on a slab in the Coroner’s Office. In the meantime, having no parent at home willing to exercise their social responsibility to provide direction for their offspring, their younger friends are increasingly using dangerous street drugs such as crystal meth, “cooked” from contrived “recipes” that INCLUDE kitty litter (and increasingly mixed with Fentanyl), to which the often emptied shelves at Wal-Mart or Superstore bear stark witness.

Our schools of yesteryear had their share of bullying and occasional racial tension, but not on the level that I’ve regularly witnessed in our current school environments. Today’s average high school students are increasingly exposed to violence and exploitation, often initiated by so-called “gang” members recruited by adults “selling” the idea of their being “protected by their own people”. In reality, boys as young as six are enlisted to participate in crimes of petty larceny or vandalism so their “protectors” don’t end up in jail, while young women are first turned into addicts, then kicked out onto the streets as “working girls” so that their “boyfriend protector” has money to pay the rent. Should these “recruits” eventually find this “life” not to their liking, their “exiting” takes one of two forms: their being beaten within inches of their lives by their former “friends and protectors”, or sneaking away at night with the help of a true friend, knowing fully well that for the rest of their lives they’ll be looking over their shoulders to see whether or not they’re being followed.

The irony here is that these are the SAME kids our jaded and narcissistic older generations expect to pay off the massive provincial debt our government is leaving behind, even as our provincial right-wing parties continue to find ways to try and separate individuals, whether urban or rural, or even blood relatives from rejecting their failed policies. They do so by taking the same dog whistles they’ve used in previous campaigns and giving them a totally new and even more innocuous meaning to a population now growing weary of hearing the same old arguments calling for “change”.

The Prince Albert Northcote MLA Report from January contains a simple example of what one can expect as the Sask Party tries to pretend that it is “protecting” both urban and rural populations alike by removing “ the carbon tax from natural gas home heating”. However, this is a FEDERAL Liberal initiative that may already be too late to implement, but is intended to wean our population from our reliance upon petroleum products. The report does not possess the racist implication of a rural MLA touting the implementation of the Saskatchewan Marshals Service to “protect” rural residents from “dangerous” Indigenous youth gangs, but nonetheless underscores the fact that their purpose is to further “divide” our electorate by introducing another “enemy” of equal danger on the urban front, that being the federal government led by Justin Trudeau.

The inference is a seriously specious point framed specifically to arouse our urban population’s objection to new taxes. City dwellers are bombarded by special interest groups (Canadian Taxpayers Federation as but one example) maintaining that the carbon tax is singly the greatest threat to our food prices continuing to rise. However, every successful farmer knows full well that crop yield reduction caused by environmental damage and drought as happened in 2022 most adversely affects the producers’ GROSS EARNINGS, while the carbon tax is merely an operational expenditure. 

Anyone who passed a Grade 10 Accounting course knows the difference between “gross” versus “net” profits, and the carbon tax is flyweight consideration in this “battle of the taxes”. What’s even more annoying is that recent changes to taxation laws and the introduction of Form T2043, agricultural businesses get rebated for the tax and obtain an additional 17 per cent increase in gross tax credits on TOTAL operational costs – just in case they have to use natural gas or electricity to prepare or finish putting their crop in the bin. 

We are angry, and with justification – we’re seriously economically strapped. However, the “cause” of this economic boondoggle does NOT reside solely in the personality of Justin Trudeau, “dangerous” Indigenous youth, sexual terminology defined in the Lumsden – Morse Scrolls, religious fundamentalism or immigrants now stealing “our jobs”. What we truly need is for our governments to start sitting down to formulate LONG TERM solutions to the problems we’ll be facing in the next fifteen to thirty years.  It’s depressing when our children are telling us that, and we don’t even want to listen.

The Young Voters’ Handbook: Recognizing Dog Whistles

Ken MacDougall
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The Young Voters’ Handbook: Recognizing Dog Whistles

This is an election year in Saskatchewan, and that means the monied crew that finance the far-right parties in this province are digging deep into their pockets to “get the word out” and spread the news of changes to be made, budgets to finally balance, and prosperity for all. The only thing missing from the “message” is the one thing voters are actually wanting to hear from them is this: HOW are you going to accomplish these things?

This lack of substance in political pronouncements has caused a burning sensation to fester on my soul and other parts of the anatomy for years. During the last provincial election I watched the Leadership Debate in stunned disbelief as Scott Moe piously “entertained” us with his closing remarks, starting with “We have a plan…”

Despite my constant reading of the news from various sources, including those on the far right, I never did find out just what was in those plans, save perhaps the granting of more contracts to Alberta construction businesses and continuing increase in debt that our children will end up having to pay.

This vacuousness is typical of our far-right parties; the problem is, however, when we bring up points to challenge their fake policy agenda, we get shouted down by the crackpots who still believe that despite our grievances over what’s wrong with our government’s approach to business, we must refrain from commentary that might elicit an emotional and slightly stronger in word response. For instance, during the Cam Broten (NDP) / Brad Wall (SP) debate, Mr. Broten was in the process of explaining how upgrading to at least Grade 12 of Indigenous students could be delivered and a living allowance paid whether or not they lived on reserve, when then-Premier Wall started talking through him so as to deflect public opinion away from this reform proposal. 

Whatever; the fact that the province could then turn around and send the bill for services rendered to Ottawa, as education provided to Indigenous students is supposed to be covered at the federal level – and is a fact that the ex-premier knew, or worse, SHOULD have known. However, what really ticked my delicate disposition was that later in the year when just talking to an older woman in a grocery aisle, the woman claimed that she was prepared to vote for the NDP, but changed her mind because Cam Broten “wouldn’t let Mr. Wall finish his objection,” an act she considered to be “extremely rude”. 

And the Sask Party or the Sask United Party think that only “leftists” embrace “woke” terminology? Give me a break.

Look, I understand it when I’m talking to my students or young adults who look at me in stunned belief when I tell them that they should vote, when their response is most likely to be “they’re all the same” – which, unfortunately is, at times, quite true. However, by using the Tax Hike Avoidance routine the Sask Party continually recites as its mantra, young voters AND teenagers are going to end up paying the $28 billion in debt we have at the moment if our government doesn’t change come October – and I’m not talking about electing still another off-the-wall party that has attracted so many Karens to its flock, such as the Saskatchewan United Party.

Simply put, right-wing governments have NO idea as to how to properly budget, as their focus is almost always on the “right now” – as was Mulroney’s in 1989 when Medicare costs were being discussed. For instance, in May of 2023, Finance Minister Donna Harpauer claimed we had a surplus of $1.3 billion in its offering, all thanks to royalties received from our mineral wealth. Where did it go? Four months ago Alberta Premier Danielle Smith maintained that their “surplus” of $14 BILLION was a sign of the effectiveness of the province having been governed by the UCP. Less than 8 weeks ago, the Western Standard, an online media source that rabidly supports UCP policy reported a surplus of “only” $4 billion; meanwhile, starting on Jan. 1, 2024, Albertans had their gas prices hiked by nine cents a litre.

Which one of the parties is the “tax and spend” edition, again?

However, let’s go back for a minute to illustrate the banality and superficiality of the Saskatchewan United Party’s agenda, particularly as was expressed in Nadine Wilson’s Jan. 4 MLA Report in the Herald. IF anyone can find even ONE item in that column in which she is speaking about what she accomplished or spoke out against or for in the past legislative session, then you’re far more politically tuned in than I will ever be. However, there are some interesting points she does make, even if she doesn’t actually complete any sentence by telling us what it means. 

Here is but one example:

  • “The missteps of the Scott Moe government have created conditions where people are more engaged in the workings of government than they have in several generations”

 – which is actually true, but for the fact that she was an integral part of that government for over 12 years and therefore should be feeling more of the concerns now being expressed in public.

It would be rather nice if I could just see Ms. Wilson portraying herself as this cause-motivated grandparent fighting for better health care and services for her grandchildren, but her non-disclosure agreement that she filed with a family complainant to keep from going to jail makes that picture totally unpalatable to me. Being elected as the Sask United Party’s leader is not her “Come to Jesus moment”, because if Premier Moe hadn’t outed her for not having yet received a Covid-19 vaccination, she’d still be running for the Sask Party, and probably still be on its Executive.

I guess that the point of all of these remembrances is that without a sound fiscal plan to restore our treasury to solvency, the Saskatchewan Party and the Saskatchewan United Party have precious little to offer our beleaguered voters. More to the point is this: in their public statements both of these parties have decided to play the “race” card in their dialogue, rather than coming forward with policy that can allow our Indigenous communities to better integrate into the more important affairs going on in the province.

Personally, I respectfully hope that I am not the only one to consider this lack of social value coming from these parties to end up becoming worse in the near future. 

Books I Would Recommend for Christmas

Ken MacDougall
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Books I Would Recommend for Christmas

Being a so-called “lapsed Anglican”, I have a tendency to view persons devoutly and with great religious belief celebrating Christmas as the actual day when Jesus was born as not particularly “of the faith”, as – unfortunately – the Bible itself disputes that very fact.

Shepherds were still tending their flocks when Jesus was born, when in actuality the flocks were brought out of the fields during the winter months in Palestine. More to the point, the very fact that the inns were full (which was why Jesus is said to have been born in a manger) only regularly occurred during the harvest season, or, in the case of the believed year of Jesus’ birth, 5 BC, the Romans were conducting a census of their conquered regions and required their citizens to congregate in major populated regions so as to be counted.

These biblical descriptors therefore pinpoint the birth of Jesus as occurring during the harvest season somewhere between Aug. 27 to Sept. 9. Other religious scholars suggest Aug. 21, for whatever reason they never say, but for the benefit of the doubt we’ll suggest that the stress of the journey to Bethlehem may have induced a mildly premature birth. In any case, by utilizing the length of human gestation, these numbers also indicate a potential birth date some time in late August and early September, 5 BC.

It’s interesting to note that anyone who chooses to pursue their Christian beliefs into the Ministry have these facts explained to them in Religious Studies programs offered in most Canadian universities. They are also aware that Dec. 25is actually the alleged date of birth of several “idols”, including three Egyptian “gods” they worshipped at the times of enslavement of the Jewish people.

Seriously, though, I don’t really mind Christmas being celebrated on the 25th, as family gatherings of a religious nature are less inclined to be derailed in their importance by some dumb uncle starting to talk about his “feelings” about Justin, Pierre (either one), The Donald, Putin, Zelenskyy or Netanyahu, to name a few. That’s because between Sept. 21 and Christmas I often find myself depressed and requiring serious inspiration to even want to work – a common emotional malady I am told can be attributed to our daylight hours are incrementally decreasing. However, on Dec. 25, we’re then four days “over the hump”, daylight hours are increasing, and this very fact seems to trigger something in all of us that says “Party Time!”. 

Fortunately for mankind, scant attention is paid to periods of proper “partying”, which means that such a day should be devoid of concerns as to whether or not you’d gone to Mass that morning or you are suddenly afflicted with abnormal eye “tics” whenever seeing certain individuals of “different” skin colouring in the party animals present for the occasion. More to the point, however, is that IF the tilting of the Earth’s axis elicits such a positive response in our northern hemisphere, then perhaps we should be considering celebrating the birth of Jesus in similar fashion when the axis changes direction on June 21 down south. I am fairly certain that the Walton family (Wal-Mart) or recently divorced Jeff Bezos (Amazon) would love such an event. 

As for myself, I’d personally choose July 1st, which is only ten days past “hump day”; however, I’m almost certain that the Americans would veto such a choice, what with their almost unshakeable belief that they are the only nation on Earth that counts, thus making July 4th a far more likely candidate seeking world approval for such a holiday.

Ah, yes, you say – all that consumerism FINALLY wrapped up in a compromise of melding religious belief with capitalism – coming, no less, from a “leftist pinko” such as I who regularly pledges my troth to the NDP.

It’s easy from this point onward to suggest that my more “woke” comrades would demand my crucifixion instead. However, if they even thought about it for a few moments, there would be a realization that such actions, Jonathan Swift-like that they may seem (without consuming any babies, a practice frowned upon by MAGA Republicans and Elon Musk alike), would by the enormity of change in economic perspectives result (I would sincerely hope, at least) in the need for a world-wide consensus as to how our dwindling rare resources could be better utilized.

More to the point, such a change would have to spur manufacturers to improve the longevity of their equipment, not to mention creating a production model that does not have to be redesigned every six months to conform to consumer stylization. As well, the demand for skilled labour forces due to production expansion would result in more workers contemplating unionized work with their better wage and benefits potential, due to the increasingly high cost of specialized education being borne by the potential wage earner. 

For people worried as to how much such celebration would cost, my advice would be to not even worry about it, because people have other things to worry about at the moment, such as our dwindling food supplies, companies deliberately delaying the delivery of products due to “Covid”, or the re-emergence of vainglorious idiots.

Seriously, though, how many people do you currently buy presents for who play no significant role in either yours or your family’s life? Buy those individuals something of more significance to their personal existence as opposed to the gift coming from you, personally. For instance, If your 25 to 35 year-old cousin working in the Oil Patch supported the “Freedom” Convoy but refuses to consider enlisting in the Ukrainian army, buy him the latest “Just for Dummies” edition of “Respect the Lines: A Guide to Parking Lot Etiquette” and wrap it up in the glove compartment of his new ¾ ton pick-up.

Come to think of it, perhaps it’s better that you consider writing your own book as a present for the kids, particularly the teenage ones who are wondering why it is that no one gives a tinker’s damn about them whenever their futures are discussed. Fill it with promises of hours you will spend for the next year coming to school events, helping them with homework, listening as to what they would hope for the future, or aiding in the diminution of family strife in their lives.

It’s your family that deserves something meaningful from you this holiday season; the question is, “Do you care enough to deliver its contents?”

Lessons in diplomacy

Ken MacDougall
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Lessons in diplomacy

Being exposed to the world is one thing; understanding what it is that has been exposed to you, however, is quite another.

I learned that fact early in life (I was 11), when upon eating our very first meal on the SS Homeric on our way to Europe to join my father, our party of three (mother, brother and me) found a full carafe of excellent red wine in the middle of our table, present at every meal, and not one bouncer in the room checking ID’s to see if you were “of age”. That’s when I realized that our next four years in “the Old World” would become very interesting.

The first hours in France were the worst for my mother, however. As my father cruised by a car pulled over on the shoulder of the road there where four males, obviously its occupants, some 20 meters or so “inland” busily “watering” a giant oak tree, one even slurping from what appeared to be a bottle of wine, and Mom wondered why the neighbours weren’t calling the cops. 

The one question that Dad couldn’t answer without laughing, however, was why the chef at a small restaurant had suddenly burst from the kitchen, wanting to know who was the “American” woman who had dared to challenge his kitchen skills. I didn’t understand that at first, either; all she’d done was ask why there weren’t salt and pepper shakers on the table. 

My father, however, still laughing, reached inside his European “pacifier” kit for a 20-pack of MacDonald Export Filter ($0.10 value, duty free) and in halting but adequate French, seemed to offer them up as an apology for daring to disturb the ambience of the establishment – or so I thought, anyway. When an already boxed platter of apple and cherry pastries were delivered to our table, Dad pulled another four packs from his “pacifier” kit and simply left them on the table.

I don’t recall seeing Dad pay for the meal when we left… 

I learned a lot more about life – and history – before we left Europe four years later. However, it took me almost three years before I could find a former soldier who would admit at age 18 that he had found himself fighting on the Western front against, ironically, Canadians instead of being on the Eastern front trying to repel Stalin’s legions. 

Few former soldiers would ever admit to having fought the Allies. Even fewer could explain how, despite the Allied Powers having stripped Germany of its industrialized machinery after the First World War for “compensation costs,” Germany had rebuilt itself in less than fifteen years, then become unglued by the resurgence of hate from which Hitler drew his eventual powers.

It wasn’t as though Hitler’s recruitment “techniques” to his “Final Solution” were any different from the race-baiters and hate-mongers currently plying their trade in belts of Canada or the U.S. Even in the 1960’s when George Wallace disciples were telling their southern brethren that God apparently “had the good sense” to create a continent “exclusively” for blacks, whites, yellows and browns, and therefore it was “unnatural” that society should make laws that prohibited individuals from “living the segregated lives” that “God” had allegedly intended for us.

Interestingly enough, it is Indigenous Elders who take this four-colour scheme of population dynamics that see something far more positive in coming from this creation. In a sense, they view it in much the same way and with the same purpose as did Greek scholars in creating their own elemental base, that being in the joining of “Earth, wind, fire and water” allowing life to take on more purpose and learn from every experimental creation in the joining of these elements.

So, we have to ask ourselves a few hard-to-answer questions, the first being that, when the Creator has also established this “crossroads” in directing us into the region of the “other”, why in Hell does this create the cauldron that we now see existing in the Hamas – Israeli war now playing in Gaza?

Are these conflicts the result of an Israel being so focused upon its very existence that it rejects potential peaceful solutions as a threat to that same existence, or is it that their “God” doesn’t seem to philosophically agree with his own preachings in another dialect, as though he/she/it were schizophrenic?

When we look at Israel, it is currently governed by a leader in Benjamin Netanyahu who is desperately attempting to hold onto power and change the constitutional nature of the Knesset to “allow” the government to control the actions of its Supreme Court. On the other side, we have a sickeningly vicious Hamas group of followers seeking the elimination of Israel by any means, yet who revel in knowing that Netanyahu’s senior Cabinet members are manipulating their acts of aggression to their own advantage, if for no other reason than to prolong the conflict to eternity.

There is almost a sense of awe that in examining the elemental system derived by the Greeks and spoken about with such richness of potential by our Indigenous peoples that we have neglected to mention that there is a fifth element more powerful and influential in shaping our earthly presence. This “quintessence” is the collection of knowledge gathered in a world court of opinion that has the potential to formulate a solution in the Middle East that allows all elements to co-exist without fear. Whether it may find that solution within the consultations of a United Nations forum or some other “group-think” is unknown at this time; we just know it has to be done, and a two-state existence must be its final shape and solution.

I remember how such “quiet diplomacy” worked when we were still young, and still in Europe. One evening just before Easter we arrived late at a France – Spain border crossing heading for Barcelona. In those days, these outposts were manned by former Generalissimo Franco troops not terribly given to befriending Canadians or helping them out in times of need, due to the reality that Canada sent a LOT of Prairie boys over to the Continent to fight beside Communist rebels attempting to overthrow Franco and his fascist regime. 

SIX cigarettes ($0.03 value) judiciously distributed had us on our way in less than 10 minutes of polite conversation.

Diplomacy does not have to be costly; it just has to have purpose. Hopefully, Joe Biden already knows this, or we’re all in trouble.

When the human mind ceases to function and remember…

Ken MacDougall
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When the human mind ceases to function and remember…

Whenever I hear a student claiming “school” is a waste of time, I usually respond by reminding them that life itself is a continuous, never-ending learning process, so get used to it, because not everything you’re going to learn you’re going to like. Unfortunately for all of us, whenever it comes to a conflict in the Middle East between Israel or any number of terrorist organizations, we have these “counter” organizations on both sides once again demonstrating that they’ve “learned” nothing new about how to finally resolve this fanatically funded problem hindering world peace.

On Oct. 7, Hamas militants committed to wiping Israel off the map staged a violent attack on southern Israel, butchered over 1,200 Israeli men, women and children, took another 250 or so hostages, then under cover of thousands of rockets sought shelter and protection in an elaborate tunnel network under Gaza that Hamas had created since their election “victory” in 2006. Almost immediately, Israeli PM Netanyahu brought out his checklist he keeps handy for just such “emergencies”: IDF reserve troops are called into action (Check); the Defense Minister places a standing order for U.S. armaments (Check); “Bibi” lays down a guilt trip on the United States for immediate “help” beyond mere armament supply (Double Check). 

Were it not for the sickening horror of viewing scenes from the initial massacre in the south, Netanyahu’s “standard procedures” routine could almost be perceived as dark comedy. I am a serious fan of historical drama, and can recall watching a 2015 episode of “The Brink” (an HBO drama/comedy starring Tim Robbins and Jack Black), wherein the writers of its plotline explained the “rationale” behind Netanyahu’s immediate reaction to call President Biden. In a scene from the first episode that was to be the start of the drama’s second season, a bemused Israeli official is going over the reasons with U.S. Secretary of State Walter Larson (played by Robbins) as to “why” the U.S.A. is so quick to come to the aid of Israel in time of crisis. 

We all know the reason; we just won’t state it out loud: America’s Christian “evangelicals” (upon whose support every American presidential hopefully receives) expect the Second Coming to occur shortly – AND in Israel; therefore, the United States is “obligated” to this sect of Christianity to assure that Israel still exists when that holy event occurs. 

Now, if you STILL don’t believe that America’s political entities wanted this reality to remain secret, here’s the “closer”: Within hours of that episode’s airing, HBO cancelled the show’s Season Two.

We have to start seeing these Middle East flare-ups for what they truly are: three world religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – each allegedly worshipping the SAME “God” locking themselves into a genocidal battle to obtain the one thing political aspirants most desire – total power. 

When this condition prevails, knowledge becomes sacrificed to the ritual of “taking sides” and engaging in actions seen only as some “sacrifice” almost worthy of martyrdom in their instigation, and so they react – both violently and stupidly, of course, by taking out their “frustrations” upon the innocent who practice their faith in Canadian synagogues or mosques by using spray paint, sledge hammers or bullets to express their “opinion”, or, as what happened when our right-wing disinformation specialists (FOX News) kept insisting that the “Communist” Chinese government had loosed the Covid-19 virus upon humanity, instead of being personally attacked because you “look Oriental”, you are targeted for confrontation because you forgot to take off your kippah before leaving home or still wore your hijab when you went grocery shopping. 

Thanks to this predictably violent reaction to such crises, our politicians walk around in a fog, trying to maintain voter “peace” while not isolating one side of the conflict from the other, yet always managing to fail in their efforts. Justin Trudeau may be perceived as someone merely parroting the lines President Biden might utter (initially, no support for a ceasefire or exchange of hostages, for fear Hamas might use that time to regroup its forces), but his inner self is screaming for such action to actually occur. On the other hand, our alleged “Prime Minister in Waiting”, Pierre Poilievre, isn’t above “hinting” that a blast on Niagara Falls Rainbow Bridge structure was a “terrorist” attack, not someone driving a luxury car into a border security structure, simply because that’s what FOX News reported – and, after all, since Conservatives believe that they have the “evangelical” vote in their back pocket, what better way to tell this block of voters that the sky is falling and beware the Muslim hordes about to overthrow democracy in Canada. 

We have to stop relying upon social media and right-wing disinformation specialists to “tell” us what is happening “over there”. Most of this crew of misfits “haven’t a clue”, if you’ll pardon the grammatical oxymoron.

Consider, for instance, FOX News replacement of talking head Tucker Carlson, Jesse Watters, who maintain that “ALL Palestinians” are responsible for the atrocities inflicted upon the initial 1,200 Jewish settlers in the south – because they “voted for a Hamas government in 2006.” Really? Are Gaza refugees, 50% of whom were children in 2006 and haven’t been able to vote for change since then, responsible for today’s chaos – and the WORST part about Watters’ nattering is that Hamas barely had a plurality in that election, and only won because Hamas played a dangerous game of “The Scorpion and the Frog”, offering to pursue and maintain “hope” of finding a “peaceful resolution” to “the Palestinian Question”, all the while planning for its demise, knowing that their Opposition, Yassar Arafat’s Fatah, was infested with corrupt politicians that Gaze residents wanted to be rid of.

Now, and despite Netanyahu’s objection to such a pathway to be followed, Israel and Hamas are temporarily working through a ceasefire agreement so as to exchange hostages and provide Gazans with much-needed aid. We know that Biden is hoping to count to “10” the number of days that ceasefire will actually last, and which in the mind of U.S. strategists could signal the knock-out count to end this conflict and get back to the negotiating table. However, what will happen should that period of peace be shattered by a new outbreak of violence?

At the start of this conflict, Netanyahu indicated that the ultimate goal of IDF forces in retaliating against the violence was to obliterate Hamas once and for all. Were this event to have happened in 1967, Israeli commanders would already have had troops directly attacking Hamas forces directly in the tunnel network; instead, all the random air strikes trying to “soften up” Hamas resistance have created is a 14,000-person “collateral damage” that has horrified even a majority of persons supporting Israel itself – and STILL its military commanders have not provided any idea as to how their goal of wiping out Hamas is ever going to happen.

The outpouring of anger over the slaughter of so many innocents and the traumas through which the 250 or more hostages and their families have gone through has produced a response no spokesperson for Hamas could have expected – world-wide massive demonstrations of Palestinian refugees and Israeli citizens calling for the creation of a Palestinian state and an end to this issue once and for all. For his part, Netanyahu is no fanboy of this ever happening, and even once portrayed former PM Yitzhak Rabin as a Nazi for even negotiating with Arafat’s PLO to make this happen. When an Israeli religious fanatic eventually assassinated Rabin, his wife blamed Netanyahu for his death. 

Right now, it seems reasonable to assume that Netanyahu is listening to Biden’s “count to 10” and realizing that his reign as PM is probably over. Even prior to this war breaking out, over 76 per cent of voters already wanted him “gone” from Israeli politics.

Netanyahu won the last election by agreeing to form a coalition with some of the most extreme parties in the Knesset. His two most powerful Cabinet members, Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich and National Defense Minister Itimar Ben-Gvir revel in their extremist views. Smotrich’s “solution” to the continuous eruptions of violence is to have all of Gaza’s population “voluntarily migrate”, then expand the creation of religious “settlements”, already a violation by Israel of international law. Not to be outshone, Ben-Gvir’s extensive criminal record includes having been convicted of supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism. Were there to be an election held tomorrow, Netanyahu’s Likud would lose at least 11 seats and the two ministers’ parties fail to reach the 3.5 per cent in voter popularity to even hold one seat in the Knesset.

Should Biden win this battle and peace talks aimed at creating a Palestinian state begin in earnest, this will not sit well with a Republican-controlled Congress teetering on the brink of insanity and still supporting Donald Trump in 2024, as America’s well-funded Christian “right” may see such a resolution to be in their best interests. What we will see, however, is Hamas voices growing silent as new Gaza leaders stress the need for aid, compassion and peace to prevail.

Should this all occur, we can therefore look forward to a Middle East voice where Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian academic and Israeli graphics designer Rami Elhanan, each having lost a daughter to conflict, help to flesh out the argument that what you are in a spiritual state can only be appreciated if the creation of that self-image results in the betterment of mankind.

My personal opinion notwithstanding, I will not be the least bit surprised when Aramin, Elhanan and President Biden win Nobel Peace prizes in 2024.

WHAT, pray tell, is Take Back Alberta trying to take back?

Ken MacDougall
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WHAT, pray tell, is Take Back Alberta trying to take back?

In one of my increasingly growing number of cynical moments, I was contemplating when the Saskatchewan  United Party would release its next list of irrelevant “issues” that would rile the good folk of Saskatchewan into a frenzy such as did set wildfires to burn in Lumsden Morse on Aug. 10.

I was almost willing to bet on their following their anti-LGBTQ theme by demanding that the provincial government refuse to allow any confectionary within a two-kilometer radius of a school to sell Chips Ahoy “Rainbow” cookies.

Don’t laugh, because a similar incident occurred in June of 2012 when Kraft Foods (manufacturers of Chips Ahoy) first ran an ad illustrating a seven-layer rainbow Oreo cookie to celebrate LGBT Pride month. Although the cookie was a fictional product (Too difficult to dunk in a glass of milk?), within mere hours following the ad’s publication a Facebook page appeared demanding a consumer boycott of the non-existent product, then later changing the context of the page to recommend that the boycott extend to the entire list of Kraft food products – simply because the company had dared to acknowledge the existence of a large “gay” community in the United States.

In today’s world, the creator of that Facebook page would  probably be elevated to the NHL Board of Governors. Now maybe that comment is a tad “cheesy”, but given the cash-strapped conditions of our current university attendees, were that same boycott option to reappear today how many Millennial-aged students would be willing to forsake their survival supply of twice-a-day Kraft Dinner meals to support the cause?

Here’s my point; ten years ago Canadian pundits chuckled about that page, and Canada would now have a few more internationally renowned comedians in Hollywood who make their living by highlighting stupidities American right-wingers adopt into their political agenda. NOW, however, we’re becoming overrun by malcontents, disinformation specialists, economic know-nothings, scientific illiterates and mirror gazers (“Karens”), who have all decided to evacuate their bat caves to form actual “political” entities supporting such stupidities. How else can you best describe the creation of absurdities such as Nadine Wilson’s Saskatchewan United Party and Alberta’s United Conservative Party, temporarily led by Danielle Smith.

The only difference between Wilson and Smith is that Smith creates her own political agenda, which Wilson AND Premier Moe both feel free to plagiarize. The problem is, after the UCP’s November 4th annual weekend convention, Ms. Smith’s tenure as premier is now being threatened from within by Take Back Alberta, the creation of reactionary nobody David Parker, who already has had too many “Andy Warhol moments” on the Alberta political stage.

Parker can best be described as “a serious piece of work”. Once a staunch supporter of Smith’s predecessor Jason Kenney, that marriage ended the moment Kenney imposed a mandate for restrictions in social movement due to then disturbing increases in Covid-19 infections paralyzing the health care system. When Alberta Health Care recommended that people might wish to consider going back to wearing masks in October following a similar outbreak of Covid cases, Parker merely echoed University of Calgary’s scientific illiterate PoliSci professor Barry Cooper, claiming even N95 masks don’t work, while maintaining that such a recommendation “again show[ed] that a hostile and communist ideology has taken over our health-care system and is defying the democratic will of the people.”

Parker’s “realities” foresee an Alberta wherein “women ought to be at home having babies, not spending their days working [within a ‘stressful’ environment’]”. Equally “sagacious”, his opinion to “eradicate gender ideology” from schools is nothing more than a backhanded endorsement of Saskatchewan’s Bill 137, the inappropriately named “Parents’ Bill of Rights”. As to his opinion on climate change and global warming, he again takes a position supporting Cooper’s claim that those who “choose” to advance the seriousness of this global concern are nothing more than cultists.

In its November 6th publication (https://thetyee.ca/Archive/weekly/, “The Tyee” contributors Graham Thomson and David Climenhaga literally did “freak-out” pieces over the range of resolutions that the TBA managed to have passed at the UCP convention. These include such “beauties” as the need to “eradicate diversity and inclusion offices at post-secondary institutions”, refuse to place trans women in women’s prisons (as if the male sexual response mechanism would work after months of taking hormone blockers),”defend the rights of those who chose not to be vaccinated,” “enshrining the right to bear arms”, opposing federal net-zero policies, banning ‘15-minute cities’ (the idea that virtually all amenities and employment opportunities within newer cities can be reached in under 15 minutes, thus allowing for greater population densities combined with less expenditures in infrastructure); banning solar farms, defunding supervised consumption sites, “letting parents censor school libraries;” and “allowing professionals to break ethics rules when they’re not on the clock” (i.e.: allow quack medical practitioners to tout their opinions and products without any scientific substantiation).

Quite naturally, Climenhaga concludes that the TBA would be laying waste to Premier Smith’s hopes of bringing fresh ideas for expanding Alberta’s economic clout by encouraging immigration and investment by these “new Canadians”. Citing political science professor Lisa Young (ironically, a colleague of Barry Cooper), he suggests that “new citizens…aren’t likely to vote for the UCP or anything like it if it advocates what Young calls ‘a heaping side dish of racism and discrimination’” – implying, quite naturally that immigrants that had previously considered settling in Alberta might now even have second thoughts after the province adopts these repressive measures through legislative action.

It is worth noting that even the most extreme of columnists know full well that Parker intends to utilize the TBA’s coup d’état of the UPC to force the party to implement most, if not all of the recommendations passed at convention, or the party, now controlled by TBA, would push her out of her leadership role. This may be good news for Alberta’s NDP, but ONLY if the media does not portray her ouster from leadership as her becoming a martyr to the cause of economic sagacity – a complete reversal of her current image, and a picture that should make even what’s left of Canada’s “traditional conservatives” double over in laughter.

What is certain, however, is that Parker’s binary sister, Nadine Wilson, will incorporate most of the TBA’s resolutions into SUP party’s 2024 platform; this in turn means that Premier Moe will also follow the TBA pathway so as to avoid further hemorrhage of his party base transferring their loyalty and vote to the Uniteds.

It should be obvious by now that the extreme right has no solution to offer the majority of voters who are sickeningly worried about the increasing cost of living, losing their home due to mortgage rate fluctuation, home heating costs or even “climate change” and global warming.

So here’s my question to readership: Do you find that the lack of attention paid to concerns of Saskatchewan’s voters by both the SUP and SP “FUNNY” – or worth their being ridiculed?

Why ‘Fixing the Past’ poses a danger for mankind’s future

Ken MacDougall
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Why ‘Fixing the Past’ poses a danger for mankind’s future

As a person who honestly believes in the tenets of “progressiveness” expressed by those who consider themselves forward thinking in their political beliefs, while holding an abiding affection for our country, nothing gets more in our way of trying to promote our ideas than some individual pointing to our history and proclaiming that out thought process is “impure”. In effect they are saying to us, before we can improve our status as a nation or as individuals, we have to first recognize, then correct the errors made by these past generations.

Marxists refer to the papering over of our past excesses as “revisionism”; the “average” individual, however, annoyed at seeing statues of Sir John A. being torn down or feeling “guilty” for harbouring anti-sentiments towards readily identified boundaries that prevent social interaction – whether based upon religion, race or sexual identification –  and not really wanting to rationalize their own feelings on such matters, call it something else – wokeism.

The idea of being “woke” is that someone has obtained both new and useful information respecting the viewing of the human condition; in other words, they are “wiser” for having gained such knowledge. The problem is, most people want to believe that they have “moved on”, and now have a better “understanding” of such issues, often by concluding that things really are “getting better”, even though they really aren’t. 

A classic example of overestimating the progress of societal evolution in general, many Americans were convinced that given the election of a black man to the presidency in Barack Obama, they had forever vanquished the stigma of racism that had overwhelmed their nation since its inception in 1776. In Canada, our national “guilts” do not carry with them the same tone of bitterness, but racism in its purest form is indeed a disease carried by many, whether it’s expressed by the feelings of north-end Haligonians towards their black neighbours in Preston, the disgust felt by Indigenous peoples towards their not being accepted as the founding peoples of this nation, or the confirmed “citizen” having attained the privilege of being called a “Canadian” now seeing an immigrant population forced from their own worlds by conflict now seeking the privileges of citizenry without having to go through the conflicts of survival as did those who emigrated from Europe during the Bolshevik Revolution or Hitler’s genocidal tactics used against minorities. 

In a recent Washington Post article, Yuval Noah Harari, a Jewish historian, attempted to redefine the excesses of wokeism in other terms, by it merely being a derivation of an “unconditional adherence to heavenly standards of purity and justice.” Taken to its extreme, for instance, during the American Civil War, as “peace always involves compromises on what people consider justice, peace must be rejected, and absolute justice must be pursued at any cost” would simply mean that until everyone got it through their thick skulls that racism as personified in slavery and physical or mental debasement was no longer to be tolerated, the war should not have ended as it did.

The Israeli-Hamas “conflict” that is once again exposing the world to “the next phase” of a Middle East struggle for survival is just another skirmish that temporarily sidetracks our attention from the low levels of attack against progressive thought that our right-wing “originalists” seem to believe should dominate our every thought. In their expression of Christian extremism, they demand that all (i.e: the United Nations General Assembly) must “stand beside Israel” against the brutality of a Hamas invasion that slaughtered over 1,400 Israelis. In effect, it is their expression in supporting the concepts of “absolute” justice, a “winner take all” resolution to the conflicts that have torn apart that segment of the world for almost 2,000 years. 

Pragmatists, however, find such support increasingly hypocritical. In describing the need for the American people to support both Israel and Ukraine, President Biden has taken to describe both as being “democratic states” seeking to be overrun by dictatorial fiat. An increasing number of U.S External Affairs experts, however, see this as a fatuous premise and resigning in frustration. They openly question Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s commitment to democracy, as he is still seeking to elevate the role of government to subvert the role of the courts, due to his own possibility of being jailed for corruption at some future date. 

What is equally provoking this minor mutiny in External Affairs is that despite President Biden having already met with Premier Netanyahu, he does not appear to have placed any “restraint” upon Israel in how to fight Hamas forces now impregnated in the Gaza Strip by its limiting of arms sales to the regime, even as it continues to prepare for a land invasion. More to the point, it has advised the non-combatants of Gaza to evacuate the region, while providing no direct pathway to allow such a retreat to take place or aid to enter the region, in effect pretty much guaranteeing that thousands of Palestinians in no way, shape or form supporting Hamas or the now emboldened terrorist groups digging in with Hamas will be slaughtered, many in the way that over 500 mostly women and children met their deaths by the bombing of a hospital in which they took refuge, and where both Israeli and its combatants refuse to acknowledge their turpitude or involvement in this sickening affair.

No one is denying Israel the “right” to defend itself, least of all the Palestinian innocents who are effectively saying, “Have at it; just let us get the Hell out of the way first.” As for the rest of the “players” wanting to play a part in this hellacious affair, Iran’s threat to “allow” its other funded minions to enter the fray have other analysts worrying that were that to happen, Israel may resort to utilization of its nuclear weaponry in retaliation. 

Professor Harari has other concerns, not the least of which is whether the Israeli government has even thought about what to do next once their Gaza “invasion” has succeeded in its purpose and despite the potential for mass slaughter. For the past decade he has watched as Netanyahu has “abandoned all serious attempts to make peace with more moderate Palestinian forces, adopted an increasingly hawkish policy regarding the occupation of disputed territory and even embraced the right-wing messianic ideas of Jewish supremacy.”

There is no question that the original intend of Hamas to attack in such ferocious fashion was “to sow seeds of hatred” in both Israel and the Muslim world. A possible peace accord ultimately leading to the creation of an independent Palestinian state, however, is the only solution that would finally rid the world of the issues of hate continuing to bury the Middle East in conflict.

Former general and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, commenting upon the turmoil that resulted from the United Nations creating a Jewish state in the middle of once was Palestine, suggested that Israelis “not be afraid to see the hatred that consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.”

His solution was to seek peace with those whom Israelis currently see as their enemy. That sentiment, it seems, still hasn’t appeared to have sunk into the thoughts of Prime Minister Netanyahu, and as long as the United States government continue to fail at the showing of leadership in this battle, we can only hope saner heads will prevail upon the temporary resolution of this conflict. That’s not “wokeness”; it’s an expression of realism and hope.

Moe’s ‘leadership’ style becoming uglier to watch

Ken MacDougall
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Moe’s ‘leadership’ style becoming uglier to watch

Were I a “Commie, socialist, left-leaning Democrat leading the world towards a WEF-regulated economic disaster” and it was a Tuesday in Washington, DC at about 11:15 AM, would be getting a few of the “boys” (no offense to my “queer” friends) together for lunch at Pedophile Pizza, a 12 minute walk from the Senate, where today’s menu will feature a five-topper featuring Paneer water buffalo cheese-stuffed gluten-free crust, diced green onions, finely chopped Trinidad Moruga scorpion peppers, Kamsack Screech-marinated Prairie oysters, segmented strips of freshly smoked wild boar bacon, and topped with delicately braised ground aborted fetus.

AND IF the featured drink of the day is their “Caesarian Special”, served in their standard half-liter sea salted mug, an 8-to-1 measuring of Leon Verres and Lucky Bastard Dill Pickle vodkas blended with the fresh blood freshly sterilized at their inhouse Botox/Abortion clinic, then sprinkled with ground black pepper and celery seed, and garnished with Giant Red celery.

OK, now; here’s the “problem”…

Without this “May I have your attention, please” moment inserted at this point, less than half of this readership would have just read over at least the first paragraph and not have the faintest inkling that IF they wanted to call themselves “informed Canadians”, their “What the Hell!” moment just occurred about 15 seconds ago.

The “literary narrative” that I was attempting to “describe” took its roots from the extreme right conspiracy theorist Q’Anon, who in the U.S. 2016 presidential race maintained that Democrats were nothing more than “pedophile groomers” who frequented a Washington pizza joint where they drank copious quantities of aborted baby’s blood, usually without the alcoholic content. There were American voters who believed this sickening rumour, including 28-year-old Eddgar Madison, who received four years for walking into the Comet Ping Pong in December of 2016 waving a rifle, looking for the abortion “mill” providing patrons with their favourite non-alcoholic brew.

Closer to home, the voice of Q’Anon now is speaking loudly in Saskatchewan. Our premier Scott Moe, desperately wanting to shore up his crumbling government’s popularity, is now determined to enshrine “parental rights” into the Canadian Constitution, if necessary by the utilization of our moronic “notwithstanding” clause. If Saskatchewan voters can’t get their minds around the fact that the premier’s motivation to make this such a “big deal” is that he’s both trying to steal Nadine Wilson’s thunder while trying to keep hidden his obvious disgust with LGBTQ issues having gained so much relevance and meaning in such a short time, you haven’t been paying enough attention to the matter, have you.

I have NEVER been so humiliated as a citizen in this province as seeing so many child adults whose parents obviously never had that “birds and bees” conversation with their own parents. What have we learned from investigating the reason for Scott Moe’s crusade to the insane side of reality, now that it’s boiling down to a crusade targeting trans and gay/lesbian kids and being denied a “right” to be described by the usage of their “preferred pronouns”? And “grooming teachers” are to blame for ALL of this, when all that I can recall of over 30 years at the front of a classroom was how pathetically children’s emotional concerns were addressed in schools? 

As a TEACHER, Mr. Moe, I don’t refer to students by pronouns; I call them by their NAME! And just in case you “forgot” some of the many word descriptors taught to you in school, a “name” is a NOUN!

What’s triggered this stupidity being taken by our provincial government. NINE letters from parents – NINE – that’s it. Who are these “parents”? Who knows, and who really cares – except that perhaps this pontification of governmental stupidity is a result of the lobbying intent of a group called the “Home School Legal Defence Association” only too willing to assure the world that parents can “home school” their kids.

The bottom line here is that we now have a group of fanatical adults who were given a PRIVILEGE to bring new life to Earth suddenly now thinking that some “divine” right has been endowed to us by a God who sees NO contradiction in seeing these SAME people not feeding their kids, failing to teach them anything, beating them, selling them – whatever, just so they can have “control” over another human beating. That’s NOT the “God” I was brought up to believe in…

Look at the stupidity of events unfolding that have created this scenario. Grade 9 kids in Lumsden suddenly had access to a dictionary of sex terminology on a set of playing cards and the kids knew more of the meanings to these words than their parents did? Allowing extremist “right to life” adherents to denigrate the efforts of Planned Parenthood in their struggle to find child abuse – the SAME freaks who’ll weep over a loss of a “potential” life but have no problem buying guns to go out and shoot “Indigenous” criminals and other “less valuable” life forms? 

Former Minister of Education Dustin Duncan made the right decision to have a public discussion as to what went “wrong” in Lumsden last June later in the school year; instead, Moe threw him under the bus because of him showing consideration for others disturbed by how odious gut reactions could turn in this province in which our vaunted representatives, and especially Nadine Wilson could throw gasoline onto the hate fires these clowns have continued to build for the last 15 years.

You want to know how to FIX this issue? DEFINE the extent of policy to which schools must adhere when dealing with a conflict between the will of a child and the concern of the parent – AND if there is ANYTHING that reeks of violence or abuse of the child by this concerned parent, including past behaviour, DENY such a right to this parent save through well-supervised mediation.

End of story… Oh, sorry; I forgot that the provincial government had the inside track on family abuse issues, and according to Moe, you can’t take away “rights” – THAT’s why this issue is only about privilege and control of vulnerable human beings.

Beatles’ ‘Getting Better’ taking on new meaning in province

Ken MacDougall
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Beatles’ ‘Getting Better’ taking on new meaning in province

Last week I noted that there may even be a “contested” nomination in the Rosthern – Shellbrook riding for someone in the NDP to run against temporary premier Scott Moe, and promised to bring further word of such a development into this week’s discussion. I’m not going to do that, though, NOT because this isn’t true, but on having been advised that there may be even more people considering running, including at least one male candidate hailing from the Shellbrook component of the riding.

IF also true, I’d like to give them a chance to make themselves known within the constituency, while attempting to get a better “feel” as to what has finally triggered members of that riding to suddenly questioning Scott Moe’s brand of “leadership.”

Rumours of Scott Moe’s “vulnerability” began surfacing along the Highway 3 Coffee Clatch circle early in the summer, just as crop seeding was about done and producers now were having a better perspective as to how the 2021’s poor harvest had hurt profitability in 2022, with the full realization that 2023 was going to see 2021’s conditions repeated, with crop yield damages rising both in terms of less quality product and higher price, due presumably to the higher expected pay-out value of the crop itself. The problem was, by the time spring planting had been completed, farmers knew what their premiums were this year, but as the Western Producer’s regular contributor Kevin Hursh would note in his August 17 column, neither he nor his colleagues were prepared for the how these new totals were going to be calculated.

In effect, the elephant in the room here is that it doesn’t matter how producers have been paid in the past, wherein the methodology for calculation of payment was based upon your “history” of receiving payouts, much like the automobile owner, the better his/her driving record, less premium is paid if you remain a “safe driver”. Under this new system, a producer’s “40 or 50 percent experience discount” was to be replaced by the “overall claim history in their risk zone.”

In the Michael J. Fox movie “Doc Hollywood”, Woody Harrelson, who has just moved to California with girlfriend (played by Bridget Fonda) to become an insurance agent, describes the notion of selling earthquake insurance when located on the top of the San Andreas Fault as the ultimate opportunity for such agencies to declare bankruptcy and keep the profits. Here in black and white is a prime example of Harrison’s barb: an anti-consumer attitude being put into play by an insurance agent of a corrupted government’s ownership using the reality of climate change to effect dramatic restructuring of insurance rates and pay-out.

Ironically, in California major insurance companies are pulling out of the real estate market due to continuous losses caused by regular seasons of wildfires and climatic induced disasters. To stop this drain of property insurance providers, the state “reversed its position on barring insurance companies from using forward-looking catastrophe models” in order to accurately predict future prices – which is what Saskatchewan is now doing. The “difference”, however, is that the California government knows full well that we are in the middle of a period of potential weather change disaster caused by human stupidity and heavy dependence upon the utilization of petroleum products; Saskatchewan, unfortunately, is completely devoid of any meaningful leadership that has the strength to admit the same.

Thus, the party that six months ago professed to be “the sole voice of rural Saskatchewan” is now moving to shore up its membership by going on record as supporting the most reactionary of causes devised by the Karen Krew of Nadine Wilson worshipers.

Premier Moe has a lot more to worry about than a group of parents, the majority of whom couldn’t care less about what goes on in schools so long as their own children aren’t found culpable of any number of frightening bouts of bullying and harassment raining down on the “less fortunate” children in the web of needing counselling and support in their personal voyages towards grown-up status. He leads the province with the worst deaths-per-hundred-thousand Covid-19 record in Canada, his province is losing doctors, especially in our rural areas, the Emergency Department in the Shellbrook Hospital where my now-deceased friend Dr. Jack Spencer once prowled at all hours of the day and night is regularly having to be temporarily closed, schools in rural ridings currently held by a northern NDP MLA are in serious need of replacement due to asbestos contamination, the province STILL not able to come up with an answer as to where the $400 million went that the federal government gave the province to help clean up abandoned oil wells, and the $1 billion “surplus” budget introduced by Minister of Coin Donna Harpauer this summer that was going to buy our votes come October 2024 now “halved” due to “unexplained” phenomena of royalty returns based upon “expected” values of the non-renewable product (i.e.: the commodity didn’t reach the price levels the government expected them to reach, as they fell for the oil industry’s “big lie” of increasing production and increased demand)…

Oh, yes; did I forget to mention this as well – that the province is in worse fiscal shape than was the Devine government in 1991, where the deficit only reached $24 billion?

But we shouldn’t be worried about these “minor” glitches, should we?

What I find fascinating about the sudden change in feelings of voters in the Rosthern – Shellbrook riding is that a substantial portion of the questioning of his leadership is coming from the Rosthern area, home of what an American correspondent might call the “Bible Belt” of the province, with its heavily Mennonite and Hutterite-leaning populations. These are religious branches of the Christian faith that most heavily support the principles of peace and understanding that the New Testament directs us to follow, and while portraying the tenets reflective within a conscientious objector, still manage to find those willing to become soldiers for freedom through their contribution to the medical corps of our armed services.

The two women considering running for the NDP in Premier Moe’s riding may not share their constituents’ religious affiliation, but their honesty in fighting for their socially directed protection of family and those in need of their support is as strong, and their contribution to the community’s wellbeing in these directions understood by the increasing numbers who are beginning to understand their feelings on life and purpose of the political agenda that the party is now seeking to project.

If Scott Moe can’t see a fight coming for his “right” to represent this riding, he is being seriously delusional – and even if he does win that fight come October 2024, the vote differential alone will reflect more on the moral tone of his constituents than anything I could use to illustrate its contradictions.

All I’m really saying is, it doesn’t matter what your political leanings are at the moment; if you want to understand the value of commitment, you should consider coming to the nominating meeting, and then make your own decision on how to vote in the future.

Analysis: Learning how to breathe again in Saskatchewan

Ken MacDougall
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Analysis: Learning how to breathe again in Saskatchewan

When I woke up on Aug. 11, the first thing I noticed was that I was actually breathing fresh, smoke-free air. I hadn’t had that sense of life-sustaining hope enter my lungs since May 1, when Alberta Premier Danielle Smith called a provincial election, a date which heavily coincided with the outbreak of hundreds of wildfires all over the province, then quickly spreading into Saskatchewan. 

Fast forward some 110 days, and suddenly Premier Scott Moe and his Cabinet are nervously watching drought conditions in over 70 per cent of the province ignite an almost desperate militancy in the agricultural sector for the immediate need of a support program.

I don’t believe in a “coincidence” of Nature providing mankind with an almost Biblical warning of an impending threat to our existence, agriculturally speaking, but then I’ve also never been impressed with governments that “plan” their election strategies based upon the resolution of currently existing problems that would have never occurred had governments been more “forward thinking” in the past. 

Politicians in western economies laugh at the notion that mainland China brings forward economic objectives for the next 100 or more years, based upon an evolution of the economy in segments that they have analyzed as occurring over the last 1,000 years or longer; we, on the other hand, can’t even fathom something as simple as balancing the population growth that came with the post-Second World War “baby boom”. We should have been encouraging immigration, or sometime around 1980 and continuing until at least 2035 we’d have to increase health-related services to Elders to accommodate their increasingly fragile life existence. 

What solutions did Canadian politicians come up with instead? In 1989, following a nation-wide study making note of an “alarming” increase in health care costs associated with the delivery of national MediCare programs, a core of provincial premiers coming mostly from “progressive conservative” ranks determined that the provision of health care “was becoming too ‘convenient’ for potential patients”, and as a result the patients were “abusing” the system. The result – Bill C-69, the Established Programs Financing (EPF) FROZE such programs for the next three years (later, extended another two years by Bill C-20). 

We can only moan as to the result, while reflecting upon what happened next. We were immediately put in peril of individuals being able to have their own family doctor (the Mulroney cuts emphasized training more specialists as opposed to General Practitioners, further compounding today’s doctor shortage issues). Doctor funding to universities meant 180 FEWER doctors per year in Canada could attend (a 10% cut-back). Nursing and support staff were cut. Infrastructure funding took a serious hit. We (Saskatchewan) started recruiting medical practitioners from Third World nations. Doctors’ fees were capped, and hundreds more simply moved to the United States. 

Not to be outdone in our stupidity, Alberta’s Getty government recommended that health care resources be directed away from institutional care (i.e.: patients get treated at home in their declining years), while recommending private financing to increase “choice” and to introduce market mechanisms into the health care system, conditions that every study in Canada taken with regard to implementation of this system has concluded that it would only further shrink the number of physicians available to practice in public MediCare funded operations.

All of these changes, it must be noted, were initially resisted by governments because of their “perceived “negative” effect upon individuals paying more in taxes for these services, when in actuality had governments paid far more attention to the future prospects of a program encountering difficulties, re-examined ways to offset their usage, or simply phased out programs no longer of any use to the public, it would have resulted in considerable savings, relative to the monies we are currently allocating for our “immediate priorities”. 

Defining our future problems in an absence of governmental leadership

And so, IF we’re going to seriously examine just what issues were brought to the fore in the August 10th election, Question One should be to list what issues were brought forward throughout the campaign that not only could be fixed immediately and have long term positive benefits in the successful completion of that mission, while Question Two might be, “What are the ‘future’ issues we should be planning for now?

It should be noted that I originally started to write this column as an extended “feature”, by providing a breakdown of events over the 29 days preceding the recent byelections to anticipate what the future is bringing in terms of issues to address. What I saw instead was a population of special interest groups attempting to outshout their opponents in having their “concerns” become the priority in terms of dealing with their allocation of legislative time, then falling back into the pattern of encouraging hatred towards those who’d “dare” to oppose their righteous concerns. 

Confrontation no longer works; it took almost 17 days of this campaign to put their One Trick Pony resolutions back in the stable and actually started talking about even the most obvious of problems, including housing costs and affordability. What finally kicked this discussion into at least first gear was the fact that we were waking up every morning either breathing Alberta toxins or having cloud overheads deprive us of the normal sunshine that allows us to enjoy the sun’s rays irrespective of the high count of mosquitos in the air. 

What I’ve done in the following paragraphs is list a string of legislative objectives that I would like to see addressed in the next generation of government rule, irrespective of parties – although I will freely admit I have my preferences. So, here goes:

  • Based upon the decisions made by the federal government in the Mulroney era and the make-up of premiers that constituted the Provincial Council during that era, isn’t it about time that the Saskatchewan Party simply stop pretending that the Romanow era resulted in mass closure of many rural hospitals, when in reality the replacement clinics formed now provide better service to the more centralized need of health care carried on in this province?
  • Should we now be putting pressure on our railroads, CN and CP in particular, to increase track safety standards so that freight can move faster through the province, increase switch lane lengths to handle typical 200 car freight lengths while allowing for less disruption and increased travel speed on passenger rail?
  • Shouldn’t we be asking the federal government for funds to develop our own high speed rail corridors (Winnipeg – Regina – Calgary), (Minot – Regina – Saskatoon- North Battleford – Fort McMurray) and (Winnipeg – Yorkton – Saskatoon – North Battleford – Lloydminster – Edmonton) to not only enable speedier transportation corridors throughout the province, but encourage increasing numbers of immigrant populations to consider our province for settlement?
  • Can we invite the Northern Ontario School of Medicine to set up shop in Prince Albert, so as to allow for the training of up to 300 doctors, nurses and health support staff to establish practices in the northern half of the province?
  • Should we start restricting urban sprawl now, so as to prevent the destruction of potential farm lands as has been the pattern in Ontario?
  • Should we be now funding programs that encourage smaller farms to change over to sustained food growth practice and market gardening?
  • Should we be providing more voice to Indigenous communities so as to increase federal funding in reserve infrastructural building, 24/7/365 day paved roads to their gates, education and housing needs, as well as economic development?
  • Shouldn’t we be strengthening our school systems to provide better quality education, particularly in areas in which parallel academic excellence must be recognized between “blue collar” as opposed to “white collar”, as in done in Germany and other heavily industrialized nations?
  • Can we “trimester” our universities and colleges so that potential graduating students may obtain some co-op training in industries willing to hire them for a four month period from Year One to graduation?
  • Can we start getting serious when helping our communities to come to grips with reconciliation issues pertaining to our Indigenous population?
  • Can we adjust part-time work hours to a minimum of 18 hours per week at least paying minimum wage, while providing standard work benefits (WCB, holiday pay, etc.) in order to create more permanent and full-time jobs in the service industries?
  • If we’re going to address the issues of criminal activity and judicial reform, can we also start by increasing pay and number of legal aid lawyers, establishing counselling and training programs that have shown positive results of decreasing recidivistic behaviours, direct addictive personalities directly into detoxification centres for a more reasonable 90 days of monitoring and control?
  • Can we finally establish full-time work programs with reasonable base funding defined, particularly for the north, for high school students to obtain summer employment in forestry, mining, recycling, recreation and sustainable food developmental farming?
  • Can we finally establish water quality research so that the damages to our fresh water supplies that have transpired over the last 50 or so years (Quill Lake, potential toxic chemical drainage into Lake Diefenbaker if irrigation , etc.) be addressed and remedied?
  • Can we finally allow our northern Indigenous communities to direct forestry management practice, while experimenting with lands taken out of food production so as to provide secondary utilization of these properties, especially in the drought-stricken townships in the southwestern portion of the province?

There are literally hundreds of these types of questions that could be asked in a different fashion, but the idea of this exercise is to give next year’s voters, especially the youth, an idea as to what problems there are in society that actually affect—negatively or otherwise—their own lives and well-being.

If anyone has a strong sentiment, particularly teenagers who might want to experiment in participating in the political process, positively or otherwise, as to the intent of, or how answers could be applied in the production of legislation, feel free to drop off your comments or analysis in mail to the Herald. If this process succeeds in getting people to stop shouting at one another, so much the better…

Columnist Ken MacDougall looks at what issues dominated the recent August by-elections in Saskatchewan, and what issues should dominate the next provincial election.

Extremists misrepresent religious teachings in denying climate change

Ken MacDougall
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Extremists misrepresent religious teachings in denying climate change

Every time I travel down Highway 1 between Calgary and Regina, which I fully admit is not often these days, I can still remember travelling from Montreal to Saskatchewan, only to turn off in Maple Creek, where the first thing I noticed about the town where I was to teach for the next year was the billboard off the main highway describing itself: Population – 2,300; Houses of Worship -24, none of which included representation of persons ascribing to the Buddhist or Islamic faiths.

My numbers may be off a tad, but not by much, I assure you; blame the differential upon the increasing failure of my aging brain, or on my being an NDP supporter; however, in so doing, trust me, you’re definitely not going to get the point I’ll be trying to make in the next few paragraphs, to which some people will again try to point out that some of the reasoning I use in describing what I oppose just “doesn’t make any sense.”

Maple Creek’s religious identity was well represented by the good old-fashioned variety of houses of prayer, including Catholic, United, Anglican, Hutterite, Orthodox, Lutheran and Baptist, but there were a few tossed in for good measure that I had no idea as to their existence, such as the Plymouth Brethren, Church of God, Alliance, Salvation Army (two chapters), Full Gospel, Jehovah Witnesses and the Christian Faith.

The cynical side of me imagined that many had found their beginning when the first  settlers from Europe who’d come this far west to escape religious persecution saw on the horizon some 50 km further west the creation of but another of our many tempestuous weather fronts laden with ominous dark clouds, lightning and a funnel cloud just starting to be formed over this front having them believing they’d already missed the opportunity to sit at God’s right hand, but after surviving that onslaught decided to create still another brand of interpreting our Biblical teachings, just to keep their hopes up in He not having already decided who were to be His “chosen ones”.

The town’s population mimicked the portrayal I’d received when first seeing that billboard entering town. For those practising “old style religion”, being seen on the ninth hole in the town’s more-than-adequate golf course on Saturdays or early Sunday mornings differentiated their “belief” in Christianity leading to a pathway of wealth and power where having a “home” consisted not of an acreage or quarter-section of farmland, but townships where grazing cattle survived on sparse grasslands others in the world would call deserts, and anyone having settled in town after World War II were referred to as “newcomers”, no matter how many of their relatives had died during that era of Canadian history.

A second group of believers, the “Book Flap Generation”, proselytized God’s word on the basis of what they’d read in Genesis and Revelations on any given morning, still not aware that in constructing the first Bible according to God’s teaching Revelations wasn’t even considered to have relative context with the teaching of Jesus. A third group, replenishing its membership in lock step with the number of teens it would lose annually to road kill found on the way into Alberta following a “beer run”, content only in the knowledge that local bars only stocked their favourite brands, and that “mixers” were merely more concentrated versions of sodas referred to as “bourbon”, “rye” or “whiskey”.

Fortunately, the high school was far more eclectic in terms of its mixture of students versus those who weren’t, those who still knew the difference in political voice between Mississippi, Ontario, Quebec or Saskatchewan itself, and those who’d already analyzed Woodstock for its meaning to their future, and still found themselves totally lost in a world where they were already beginning to hate their parents’ reticence to contribute normalcy to their confused lives, much less the realization that the world around them was changing rapidly, but their elders were so wrapped up in themselves that they were failing to notice this very fact.

What pleased me the most, however, was the fact that almost without exception these kids craved knowledge, something often denied them by even their own parents or school administrators. I can still remember the conversations I used to have with one of my Grade 12 Physics 30 female students, started when I “dumbly” asked “why” she hadn’t included a course in Biology in her class itinerary, little realizing that as the daughter of a couple ascribing to the Plymouth Brethren faith, their unwillingness to address the teachings of Darwinism meant that her answer was almost contemptibly simple in its utterance, although she diplomatically refrained from suggesting my ignorance of their faith’s tenets reflected such disdain.

Even today, however, I wonder how this young woman, who along with three other “sisters” of her religious beliefs could suddenly find life “normal” once married a year later to someone from the Caribbean whom she’d never met prior to taking that class would fare, given that their own 90+ average in the subject and part of a group in the school that would pull off the highest provincial average score to that date in the history of composite schools in Saskatchewan, and with their capacity to improve upon this learning pathway being deprived of further exploration by their keen minds.

And so it goes. As the years follow this timeline, we as teachers and our children find ourselves being resisted in efforts to maintain a deeper standard for allowing these soon-to-be adults to seek answers to the questions we’ll never be allowed to ask, even in the Section C of what are supposed to be the “problem solving” opportunities of our lesson plans. In today’s classroom, even with a Master’s degree in the teaching of my subject and having assisted in the creation of published materials, there is always some superintendent questioning my reason for introducing alternative pathways to learn the materials. It makes me wonder how my former Director in Maple Creek would feel after having first shown him (accidentally) how to interpret statistical results, how he would have felt knowing that in instructing that brilliant group of students in Physics 30. I’d suggested that they’d understand the materials far better were we to spend the first three weeks of class familiarizing ourselves with the creation of equations used to calculate the paths of conic sections, as well as introductory understanding of differential and integral Calculus.

No, were I still under the age of 16, as a “child” I would begin to be seriously concerned as to how this next generation of parents are hindering our ability to learn, much less practice the art of survival their depriving me of knowledge, sexual, scientific or historical understanding, particularly with regard to the need to reach across the divide our politicians are creating for us, in order to allow me some capacity to be able to “teach” my own future generation.

If you examine the platform agenda for the various parties, you can immediately spot the items politicians don’t want you to fully comprehend, including what’s happening to our Earth in terms of climate change and our economic future, particularly when it pertains the creation of the energy resources we will require in order to further progress in the enhancement of our lives.

My cynical nature has no real boundaries save to note that the floods during Noah’s time were not the result of climate change, but rather in God’s disgust with the manner in which his “superior” creations, mankind, were destroying the blessings he’ bestowed in the Earth’s creation, and wanted a “do-over”.

Climate change is doing just that for us; the problem is, we’re still too insufficiently “evolved” so as to intellectually recognize what is happening, and to what consequence.

And here endeth the sermon…

“United” use of Gaetz – MTG “logic” difficult to understand in Lumsden Town Hall fracas

Ken MacDougall
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“United” use of Gaetz – MTG “logic” difficult to understand in Lumsden Town Hall fracas

As I stated in last week’s column, former Conservative MP Gerry Ritz should have stayed “retired” if all he intends to do on the hustings is plagiarize the tactics of Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Ritz is inserting his new party into an acrimonious and American-orchestrated debate involving culture, sexuality, human rights and the future course to be taken by Canada’s educational system. When we add Saskatchewan “United” Party leader Nadine Wilson to this farce, we’re merely adding the instability of a politician whose word we will never be able to trust due to her unfettered contempt for accountability by having wrapped herself in a veil of nondisclosure agreements. 

By using what can only be described as “greaseball” political tactics, these “United” leaders have somehow managed to turn an “orderly” but serious concern of some Lumsden parents into a political football, one that now threatens to undermine our appreciation for the progress being made in codifying human rights while wondering whether our children will ever harvest the fruit of our legislative efforts.

Readers may recall that on June 23rd, Minister of Education Dustin Duncan temporarily banned Planned Parenthood from conducting sexual education workshops because one of its APPROVED presenters brought “age inappropriate” materials to supplement the Grade 9 presentation in Lumsden. While many conservative groups despise Planned Parenthood’s policies respecting birth control and counselling of young women seeking abortion advice – including Sask Party members, Duncan’s edict was an honest response to parental concerns echoing in Lumsden over the incident, with the assurance that the government would give it further scrutiny when children return to school in the Fall.

“United” party members, however, felt that this issue provided sufficient red meat to enable them to score points in the anticipation of the government calling a by-election for Lumsden – Morse, and organized a seemingly “spontaneous” “Protecting Parents’ Rights Town Hall” to be held on July 5th in Lumsden itself. More than 250 people showed up, just in time to watch Ritz and Wilson turn the town hall into a parody of the American right’s standard rallies citing governmental abuse of the educational system and usurping parental “rights”.

Ritz immediately went for the jugular, invoking the beliefs of MTG in slandering Democrats by calling all Planned Parenthood workers “groomers”, while maintaining that “Our families are under attack…”. Adding her “Amen”, Wilson pledged party support to the parents’ “cause”, noting that as “a grandmother of 10…we’re going to fight for you.”

We have also noted that MTG has defended the usage of “groomer” in describing her political opponents, maintaining that “Democrats support…children being sexualized, having transgender surgeries…[it’s]what pedophiles do to children.”

Stunned political observers note that her colleague, Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, still under investigation for allegedly transporting underage women, might better fit such description. Politicians blaming progressives for the abuses they now perceive preying upon their children may be a hard one for the public to get one’s mind around. However, it isn’t that our so-called “conservatives” aren’t trying to perform a feat that in conventional political circles might seem politically “impossible”.

This backwards journey started the moment statistics started showing that the political right were apoplectic with rage when a majority supported the entrenching of rights of LGBTQ2+, transgender citizens and allowing same-sex marriages to be universally legalized. We know that American “progressives” made similar assumptions when they declared that “race” was no longer a “dividing issue” in the U.S. because they’d now elected Barack Obama president – twice. 

However, we should have realized that by their constant campaigning to overturn Roe v Wade the fringe right and religious zealots will NEVER accept any law or social movement that sees progressives advocating for greater rights and freedoms, and having them enshrined in law. Thus, as we now see their tactics now being unfolded in full public view seeking ways to change and reverse public opinion and return control of the “rights” agenda to their camp.

It should have become obvious by now to our political campaign organizers that this charade created by the United Party is merely a “first step” in sewing the seeds of doubt. Parents, in the past, have accepted the educational agenda as one in which parents and government could work as “equal” in the creation and provision of common curriculum. However, now that they’ve allegedly been “shown” by the orchestrators of this “United” disinformation campaign that a government has marginalized their role to play in the education of their children, it’s only too obvious that they are reacting skeptically to the suggestion that the role of parent is soon to be overtaken by some “deep state” political entity.

Reality rather suggests that parents have become more vulnerable to this ploy of deceit by observing what has happened to the mental psyche of their children. After almost three years swaying to the winds of inappropriate Covid-10 policy designed to accommodate Donald Trump’s original contempt shown for the virus’s potential danger, they are STILL reflecting negatively and with great hostility as to the seeming decline of their own self-worth, identity and even sexuality. This in turn has resulted in children almost unanimously making the decision to remake themselves in a manner that provides them with a more secure sense of identity – and thereby embracing the very lifestyles that their more conservative parents seek to resist. 

By labeling these children “unprotected” within a society autocratically granting new lifestyle “rights” without first seeking acceptance from their parents, the religious right hopes that this tactic will eventually succeed in driving members of the LGBTQ2+ community back into the closets of victimization.

This phenomenon is not the creation of a parallel and controlling educational paradigm populated by Planned Parenthood, or left-leaning “influencers” but rather a trend having established in our schools called “accommodation”, wherein without exception the school no longer has any control of curriculum learned, what is taught in class and to what degree of difficulty, and parents explaining what “standards” are to be expected of them before they can call themselves “successes”.  Parents are increasingly having to be reconvinced that the eventual objectives of school and home are one and the same – and that following these upcoming by-elections and the 2024 campaign, this must become their focus for renewal and accommodation of assuring parents that their role within the classroom is still valued, no matter to what political persuasion you might subscribe.

‘United’ talking heads Ritz, Wilson sounding more like Gaetz – MTG than Canadian politicians

Ken MacDougall
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‘United’ talking heads Ritz, Wilson sounding more like Gaetz – MTG than Canadian politicians

Why the increasingly boring and totally irrelevant former Conservative MP Gerry Ritz can’t take a hint and stay “retired” is beyond me; every time he opens his mouth, I am reminded as to the role this has-been played in colluding with Stephen Harper to rid Canada of the Wheat Board, and the subsequent chaos that move made in the grain transportation scheme of things – Big Ag rushing out to sign the “big producers”, pressuring the rain system to prioritize unloading of produce at our export ports, and in the end causing over $17 BILLION in penalties to be assessed against grain producers, or approximately $114,000 EACH on average for the just under 44,000 producers in Saskatchewan at the time of this political philosophy war crime’s undertaking. That’s $5 billion divided by 44,000 – you do the math…

Randy Hoback often referred to Mr. Ritz as the ultimate “friend to farmers”; I’ve never been able to get my mind around whether he meant that in truth or as with some wry sense of regret for even knowing him…

Then we have Nadine Wilson, now leader of the province’s latest addition to party irrelevance and hard right-leaning half-truths and outright lies, the Saskatchewan “United” Party. Wonder how this new “image” goes over with Elders in her riding…

The reason I’m even writing about these two is because of the sideshow they created in Lumsden on Wednesday was exactly of the variety and content I’d expected to come from the Saskatchewan Party. On June 23rd, Minister of Education Dustin Duncan had issued a “directive” to BAN Planned Parenthood from presenting workshops on sexual education, at least until September, because one of its APPROVED presenters brought “age inappropriate” sexual discussion-prompting playing cards to a Grade 9 presentation in Lumsden.

The original reports that the Minister first received respecting this event was that in passing out of these cards to some students following its presentation Planned Parenthood did not take into consideration the fact that SOME of these cards might have contained materials that were “age inappropriate” – and that alone would be a good enough reason for the Sask Party to “Go Ugly!” come the 2024 campaign – and link Planned Parenthood and the NDP together to place them in opposition to the post-“Roe v Wade” crowd of neanderthal Republicans finding unique ways to further the cruelty presented to women wanting only the right to have access to safe medical care and access to abortion proceedings.

Wilson and Ritz, it now seems, would like the upcoming three by-elections in and around Regina to become “workshops” on how such an attack on the NDP would work before channelling them into the knife fight that 2024 will bring out between the Cracker Channel adherents of right-wing “culture”. And so when the Saskatchewan Party decided to call a “Protecting Parents’ Rights Town Hall” this past Wednesday, more than 250 people showed up at the Lumsden Town Hall to listen to Wilson and Ritz try and score some political points showing their party’s “concern” for this alleged abuse of the educational system.

In what would soon become a forum wherein the Saskatchewan United Party would unveil its true reasons for attending this gathering, that being to express their opposition to LGBTQ2+ and transgender health policies and rights. Former Harper shill and Minister of Agriculture Gerry Ritz started his sermon off by noting that “Our families are under attack…THEY think they’re going to win on the family level by sending in the so-called educators from Planned Parenthood”, whom he then proceeded to refer to as “groomers.”

Other than the fact that I’m still trying to find out just WHO were the “they” to which Mr. Ritz was referring, Mr. Ritz’s comments sounded not unlike MTG’s April 2nd televised interview when she referred to Democrats in general as “groomers”. Asked by CBS interviewer Lesley Stahl to explain that comment, MTG went on, maintaining that “Democrats support – even Joe Biden, the president himself – children being sexualized, having transgender surgeries…what pedophiles do to children.”

I would like to point out that oft-companion to Ms. Greene is MAGA Republican Matt Gaetz, a Florida Congressman representing the Tampa Bay area, currently under investigation for allegedly transporting, and having a sexual relationship with a young women of 17 years of age. One might actually see him as fulfilling the role of a true “groomer” for sexual purposes – that is, BUT for the objections of the even “harder” right wing-nuts who prefer to impose such labeling upon “trans” people, whose very doubts as to their personal sexual identity, whether “male” or “female”, have decided to answer this question by imposing on THEMSELVES the decision to re-identify themselves to society as of the opposite sexual persuasion, or perhaps even non-sexual.

Ritz may want to take a trip down this alley to see whether or not it “sells” in this heavily fundamentalist and religious section of the province, but even there parents are all too conscious as to how the past three years of dealing with the traumas induced by Covid-related actions and laws that may or may not have been beneficial in minimizing that disease’s influence upon their behaviours to follow in their children’s pathway to adulthood have contributed themselves towards having their young question almost everything about themselves, including who they truly are, sexually or otherwise.

Still, in pretending that she had no linkage whatsoever with whatever legislation her former colleagues in the Saskatchewan Party had taken in administering Covid-related policies, Wilson again plays the “outrage” card, “a grandmother of 10 beautiful grandchildren…[who]. wouldn’t want them to see…that filth. And we’re going to fight for you.”

To “fight” – and for what – is a really good question to ask here. Were the playing cards that “graphic” that the intent of the Planned Parenthood presentation was despoiled by their presence? I’m not going to provide an answer to that question, simply because as an adult who has had to give similar presentations in class (albeit for people over the age of 18), I had to look up the meaning of some of the terminology myself.

Did the cards include pornographic imagery to even “define” them as being “pornographic”? Not to the best of my knowledge.

And finally, despite by expanding a Grade 9er’s vocabulary in a rather bizarre direction, does anyone believe that the children actually using the cards to answer some of the questions their own parents should have been explaining years ago “traumatized” or permanently and emotionally damaged?

Let me answer that question as a teacher. When you’re doing hall duties during recess or other school events, you see words carved in the elementary school washrooms that you know the kids could only have heard coming from their parents’ lips. When you call in a parent to discuss how he and five of his buddies from Grade 8 were “body surfing” a severely traumatized Grade 6 girl as though they were all having intercourse with her, and the mother accuses you of making this stuff up DESPITE the Principal witnessing the event (and doing nothing to stop it), or worse, having some of your best students reporting the rape of one of their classmates, and knowing that the RCMP aren’t going to even hear about it – what’s worse?

Could this event have been handled better by Mr. Duncan? Of course – but that’s too late now, isn’t it?

Are the “United” party going to bring this incident up again in the near future, just to scare up a few more political points? Probably – but if they do, I might just drop by one of their “rallies”, just to see to whom Mr. Ritz will attribute the word “they”.

He won’t have to yell his answer across the entire hall for me to hear it, either…

Recent concerns raised as to the deterioration of graduate grade levels within Indigenous student ranks misleading and arrogant

Ken MacDougall
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Recent concerns raised as to the deterioration of graduate grade levels within Indigenous student ranks misleading and arrogant

It’s always interesting to find quality content in the Herald dealing with matters of governance that are disturbing to most Saskatchewanians, to the point wherein they lead into a legitimate debate, as opposed to the standard “I Hate Justin” tripe we keep hearing from CPC leader Pierre Poilievre, SP leader and premier Scott Moe, or the decreasing number of “Karen” members of the Saskatchewan “United” Party, led by former SP MLA Nadine Wilson. Wednesday’s article, “Saskatchewan’s Indigenous high school graduation rates largely unchanged since 2018: auditor”, is one such piece.

Written by the Leader Post’s Alec Salloum, the sheer bluntness of provincial Auditor Tara Clemett’s quoted words suggest that she is desperately attempting to avoid whatever anti-intellectual inference may be attached to the story by our right-wing parties, but without much success. 

Starting from Grade 10 and over three years statistics show that only 60 per cent of Indigenous students will complete Grade 12, as opposed to over 90 per cent attending classes in the public sector. This factor also results in a considerably noticeable gap in the number of Indigenous unemployed (18.6 per cent v 5.6 per cent), and although these results were being reported upon the failure of the Ministry of Education’s 2018 strategic plan “Inspiring Success: First Nations and Métis PreK–12 Education Policy Framework”, no causal effect could be linked to its findings, simply because the plan offered absolutely no time frame within which to measure such objectives, nor whether such a task had even been recommended by the plan’s creators.

As an amendment to the “Inspiring Success – Building Towards Student Achievement: First Nations and Métis Education Policy Framework (2009)”, its objectives appeared to be addressing the proper educational needs so as to bridge the differentials between learning through First Nation and/or Metis methodologies versus the Euro-centric manner in which such knowledge is presented, and our dire needing to share such knowledge, methodologies and cultural expectations addressed. 

In Dr. Marie Battiste’s words, “Indigenous knowledge is inherently tied to…particular landscapes, landforms and biomes where ceremonies are properly held, stories properly recited, medicines properly gathered and transfers of knowledge properly authenticated.” 

Unfortunately for Ms. Clamett, but amusing nonetheless, I HAVE seen a significant amount of the information the Auditor now seeks – within the contents of my Master’s thesis, published in 2007. I even quoted certain facts pertaining to her inquiry in a publication expected to be released by the Prince Albert – DENE on or about June 26, 2023, reflecting the SAME concerns as she, BUT with reference only to the Harper government’s 2014 and 2015 release of his First Nations Student Success Program (FNSSP), put into play in 2014 and 2015.

Equally frustrating, were the Auditor pursue this matter to the federal level, she would invariably find first that, while Indigenous Services Canada did collect such data, the “Spring 2018: Reports of the Auditor General of Canada to the Parliament of Canada”, and “REPORT 5: Socio-economic Gaps on First Nations Reserves—Indigenous Services Canada” ALSO did not report results coming from the FNSSP, and probably never will, 

It concluded an overwhelming number of teachers yielded some substantial “positives” to mathematics learning through their teaching efforts. That included Ms. Eva Satra, Mr. Wayne Branton and myself, who were performing such tasks in Hatchet Lake, where our school’s results exceeded an 1,100% improvement. The result that could have been even higher, IF most male students had even bothered to show up for the final examination.

Looking at the 2009 release of the “First Nations and Métis Perspectives and Ways of Knowing” legislation the study wasn’t really asking for much. Something had to be done to recognize the role Indigenous kids played in the educational process (and was) but the message that the public as well as both the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and the Federation of Saskatchewan Indigenous Nations (FSIN) received from Scott Moe’s government was for them to not expect the province to recognize Nov. 30 as a National Day for the Discovery of Truth and Reconciliation for the nation any time soon. 

Canada’s Constitution allows the province to “administer” federal education processes, define curriculum and grant degrees, which they’ll gladly do, just so long as those duties do not require them to fund their perpetual screw-ups; if you’re looking for money, talk to the feds; that’s their “responsibility”.

Actually, we should be thanking Ms. Clemett for “exposing” this data deficient situation, especially since the graduation level “problem” is not only resurfacing among Indigenous students’ results, but is also trending in Saskatchewan’s smaller school districts. Provincial education authorities, without any form of supporting “evidence” maintain that the ideas that consultants such as those with whom I work are failing to incorporate “fresh” programs that further “stimulate” students to succeed, as what we’re doing, even within the Job Readiness program work with the Prince Albert Grand Council – DENE is considered to be “same old, same old”; mine is more like “You don’t know what the Hell you’re talking about.”

There’s no “arrogance” meant here. Today, even the quietest of teachers having legitimate reason for educational reform make themselves potential targets for recrimination, when it’s far less stressful in silently waiting for them to finish their point of view.

On June 30, I will ask PAGC – DENE to release my 30 point response towards radically revising the senior high school credit list and imposing change within the classroom, including asking teachers at the lower elementary levels to resign and make way for more potential role models more suitable to that profile of excellence.

Should Ms. Clemett in the meantime wish to discuss her concerns as to missing data coming from high school probing into the graduation rates of our northern high schools, I will be more than happy to set aside time for the task.

As well, thank you, Alec Salloum, for writing this piece up so that the issue can receive the critique it deserves.

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