For all intents and purposes, the provincial election campaign of March 7 to April 3 2016 was a one-horse race. The only question left when the polling stations opened Monday morning was whether at the end of the day there would be a Saskatchewan Party government with an overwhelmingly massive majority in the legislature or merely a very large majority.
The media, of course, did its best to frame it as a two-horse affair, with the NDP as challenger, but even pitting Cam Broten against Brad Wall in the only televised leaders debate was a mere blip in the proceedings.
If you were really paying attention, however, you might have noticed four other horses lagging way back in the dust.
Yes, that is absolutely true. There are, in fact, six registered political parties in Saskatchewan that fielded candidates this year. Most people would probably identify the Liberals and the Greens as the third and fourth parties. Older voters probably remember the Progressive Conservatives as the fifth, although they have been decimated in recent times and only managed to field 18 candidates.
You will be forgiven if you don’t know the sixth party is the Western Independence Party of Saskatchewan (WIPSK).
Founded in 2003, the party’s main raison d’etre is pretty self-explanatory. It wants Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, The Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut to separate from Canada and form a new country.
Its flag, adopted with a minor colour change from the now defunct federal party and namesake Western Independence Party, has a blue field over a green field representing sky and land. The two fields are separated by a white line that peaks on the left side then flattens out representing the mountains and prairie. In the sky is the Big Dipper, the most prominent of northern constellations, it’s seven stars representing the seven western political jurisdictions.
David Sawkiw is a founding member of WIPSK, the current leader and ran in the Canora-Pelly riding this year. He is serious about separation and democratic reform, but was able to keep his sense of humour during the campaign.
“I don’t think we’re going to form government,” he quipped last week. “We’ve only got four candidates.”
Although the votes don’t reflect it, Sawkiw believes people are sympathetic to the cause.
“There’s a lot of interest going on with separation right across the west,” he said. “Alberta’s really kicking in high gear and I expect you’re going to see some real big results in Alberta in their next election. The next election we have might have some pretty good results for us too.”
Sawkiw believes the sentiment is simmering and will eventually boil over.
“There’s always been a fair amount of people just under the surface,” he said. “It ebbs and it flows depending on what’s happening and, of course, we’ve got this Liberal guy now in Ottawa and there’s a lot more interest now than there was when Harper was in power because Harper kind of smoothed things over for the west.
“Basically what’s happening is the Liberal government’s not paying any attention to the west, as usual. There’s this pipeline that we want to build out to the east and they don’t want it. And there’s a lot of past issues, of course, like gun control. There’s rumours that Trudeau’s going to bring back in the registry and that sort of thing. The big issue’s always been the transfer payments that the west has spent on Quebec and Ontario, now that they’re a have-not province, so that’s always been an ongoing issue and I think people are finally waking up to exactly how many dollars is involved with that. I’ve known for years an average of about 10 billion dollars goes to Quebec every year and it’s funny how that works because usually it’s the western provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan that usually pay in about 10 billion dollars a year and that’s been going on for 20-some years now and people are catching on to that and they’re starting to realize exactly how much a billion dollars really is and what can be done with it in the west here if we were to keep that money here rather than send it to Quebec.”
Sawkiw believes separation will come, but he sees some impediments.
“With the Clarity Act, it’s quite legal for a province to separate, but it makes it tough for us as a group of provinces to separate legally. I guess you could have a revolution like the Americans did against the British back it 1776, but we don’t really want to go there.”
Instead, he said, the provinces and territories will have to get out individually and then form a new country afterward. He said although it is onerous to do it one jurisdiction at a time, he has no doubt Saskatchewan could make it on its own while it waited for the others if the province was the first to achieve independence.
“It’s simply economics,” he explained. “I’m no economics expert, but I do know the value of resources. I do know the value of what we have here and if you take the value of our oil, which is quite a bit; and the value of our potash, which is quite a bit; and the value of our farmland, which is quite a bit; and trees and all the resources that we do have here, uranium, you name it, we’re very resource rich and quite population poor. Now, I’m not saying we’re going to sell the province, don’t get me wrong, but if you can wrap this around your head, if we sold to, oh, I don’t know, some big entity, our potash and we sold our oil and we sold our trees and our farmland for fair market value on the world markets, and then you take that amount of money in the billions and billions and trillions of dollars and you divide that up amongst the million people we have here, how much money would you have? How much money would your kids have?
“We don’t have any people here, and there’s all this wealth, and we’ve had that situation for a hundred years, population-poor and resource-rich, and yet we struggle. We have people living on the streets, we have people living in squalor. We shouldn’t have that at all. We are filthy rich people. So, would we survive? Yes, absolutely, without a problem. Go to Europe. What has Switzerland got? It’s landlocked, it’s about half the size of Nova Scotia and it’s got nothing and yet it’s a viable country.
“It’s our own small thinking that doesn’t allow it.”
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