Whether the Saskatchewan legislature was ever a great place for debates is… well… debatable.
We love to talk about the good ol’ days when those we elected were all brilliant orators and when every word uttered merited our undivided attention.
My recollection may not go quite back to the heyday of the Tommy Douglas-Ross and Thatcher Mossbank debate on Crown ownership.
I do, however, recall some great barnburners from the likes of Grant Devine, Roy Romanow and Allan Blakeney on public-versus-private ownership.
Also, it’s easy to recall any number of brilliant speeches from Saskatchewan Party Premier Brad Wall, whose speaking skills are considered a throwback to those bygone days.
But they were few and far between. Most are time-wasting nonsense that produce a lot of heat, but very little light, even on critical issues like the privatization of the Saskatchewan Potash Corporation when the rules of the day allowed long-winded filibusters.
So whether speeches are any better or worse today than they used to be may largely be a matter of debate. Less debatable is the fact that rule changes limiting hours of debate do cause more succinct conversations.
As such, one might have thought last week’s debate motion calling for the legislature to support Wall’s climate change white paper and oppose the federal government’s national carbon tax might have been an issue where our politicians of today really rose to the occasion.
Sadly, they didn’t.
But that might have less to do with the lack of orator skills among today’s MLAs than it has to do with the fact that legislature has always been filled with debates less about passion or solution and more about the politics of the place.
This is not to say that Wall is not sincerely passionate about this issue – or even that his arguments against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's $10- to $50-a-tonne (by 2022) are not valid.
A per-tonne tax on oil, gas, mining and agriculture has the potential to severely hurt those primary industries.
Wall is likely right that Trudeau simply has not done his homework on how his tax may impact Saskatchewan... or, really, how it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But that happens to be one area where Wall’s Saskatchewan Party, the NDP and everyone in the province agree.
And given Wall’s motion in the legislature stated “this assembly opposes the federal government’s plan to impose a national carbon tax,” there seems precious little for politicians to debate.
What also seems of less debate is that something has to be done to address GHG emissions.
This may not be something all that easily accepted on coffee row, but even the Wall government’s climate change white paper is rather unequivocal in its position that the globe is experiencing its warmest days in the past 11,000 years due to GHG emissions.
But if you look at what Wall and the Saskatchewan Party have been proposing on the environment for the past decade now, this should come as no surprise.
As noted by the NDP during the legislative debate, the Saskatchewan Party’s 2007 election platform promised to "stabilize greenhouse gas emissions by 2010; reduce GHG emissions by 32 per cent by 2020 and reduce GHG gases by 80 per cent by 2050."
The NDP also noted Wall's 2010 Management and Reduction of Greenhouse Gas Act that former environment minister Nancy Heppner described as a "carbon compliance price."
That these issues weren’t noted in Wall’s white paper was more than a little strange.
It demonstrates how what gets debated in the legislature isn’t the best ideas, but either new ones or ideas that have already been proposed.
What we instead see at the legislature is a lot of bluster, but very little exploration of facts.
But if it’s any consolation, it’s mostly always been that way.
