Dear Editor:
As many ought to be aware by now, I have been working with the Why Tower Road group for some time, and this week, the Official Opposition Party, the New Democratic Party, finally granted our group a sit-down meeting to discuss some of the more serious concerns we have discovered through our own efforts over the past several months. I want to say up front that this has been a team effort by a number of us, and it is because of that team effort that we have been so successful in not only uncovering what we feel are the actions of a corrupt government, but exposing it to the public through our various media channels, including our website, social media and letters to the editor, such as this one.
I had high hopes for the meeting, as it seemed to take forever to get such a meeting to take place. And it’s not for lack of trying, after all, as our group had been literally spoon feeding the NDP boxes of documents over the past several months, and sending letter after letter to request a formal meeting to discuss what was in those boxes. Unfortunately for the NDP, it took the Saskatchewan Progressive Conservative Party to break open the Global Transportation Hub Scandal, and thanks to Geoff Leo and the CBC, it has been breaking news ever since. From the stonewalling of Freedom of Information Requests, to the canned response in the Legislature by the Saskatchewan Party of “the auditor found no wrongdoing”, the NDP have been exposed to the kinds of issues that honest Saskatchewan residents had to endure for months, up until the point that the NDP finally grasped onto the story during the previous election. Interestingly, they continue to miss bringing up several key points that would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the GTH scandal isn’t just a one-off situation, but a trend of a much larger agenda that warrants open and transparent public discussion.
It was disheartening, to say the least, when Cathy Sproule of the NDP felt it necessary to suggest that the questions we presented to her in good faith at this meeting “had been asked already”, and that “it’s not worth bringing them up in Question Period because the Saskatchewan Party will just answer the way they have been with the GTH.” It’s attitudes like this that show me exactly WHY the PC Party has proven to be a far more effective opposition party with no MLA’s, than the NDP have been with 10, because of the fact that they aren’t willing to ask the hard questions of the Wall Government. Considering everything that we have been able to expose through our very informal media channels, we can’t help but wonder why the Official Opposition feel that it is up to us, honest, hardworking, taxpaying citizens to raise some of the most basic, common sense questions to a Government that is supposed to be working as our voice in the Saskatchewan Legislature.
Now many have asked: Do we have time to organize a new Party? Should we even be expected to do so? Do we turn our support back to the scandal-plagued PC Party, which was infamous for nearly bankrupting our province, hoping that the next-wave of the party will learn not to do what their predecessors did?
These are questions that we all must ask ourselves. I strongly encourage you to write your MLA, regardless of which Party they belong to, and ask them why they aren’t willing to talk publicly about the “Tower Road Alliance” in particular.
Chad A. Novak, CPA, CMA
Saskatchewan Taxpayers Advocacy Group
