With less than three weeks remaining before the convention, Gord Wyant’s Sask Party leadership bid was back in the Battlefords on Monday afternoon.
He was at the Blend on 100th Street for an afternoon meet-and-greet event to seek support from local party members. Battlefords MLA Herb Cox introduced Wyant and lent support as a caucus colleague, but has continued to maintain his neutral stance by not publicly endorsing anyone in the leadership race.
Wyant’s event took place just days after Scott Moe was in the city for his own event, as leadership candidates make their final push to secure support in the race’s final three weeks.
“When we started, you look down the road for five months and you never think it’s going to come to an end,” said Wyant.
“And all of a sudden you’re close to the end and you wonder where the time went. I think that that’s a good indication that things are going pretty well.”
Early on in the campaign, Wyant had pledged to visit every one of Saskatchewan’s 61 provincial ridings as part of his leadership bid.
Wyant said Monday that by the end of this week, that goal will be met with a campaign swing to northern venues including La Ronge.
Prior to that, Wyant was scheduled to go to the Crop Production Show in Saskatoon and then head to Prince Albert, Shellbrook and Spiritwood in the middle of the week.
His campaign is already a well-travelled one. Wyant estimates it’s “38,000 kilometers we’ve put on the truck since we started the campaign.”
Voting has started in the leadership race, as mail-in ballots have now been sent out to eligible party members. Wyant’s campaign is now working to remind their supporters to send their ballots, and he believes there are still people out there who haven’t made their decision yet.
“There’s still some people undecided,” said Wyant, but “the main priority will be getting out the vote.”
Wyant noted the importance of his efforts to continue to go out to the various communities during these final days.
“We’re going to continue to make telephone calls, we’re going to continue to travel around the province meeting people. I think it’s important to continue to have these conversations. Even though people are starting to vote, I think it’s important to come to communities and just engage with people, because those are the conversations that really impact some of the policy decisions that we need make as government.”
At the North Battleford event Wyant continued to put forward his policy initiatives including support for smaller and more efficient government, as well as for public education and improving services for mental health care and addictions.
On the latter two issues Wyant noted the importance of the government getting these right, saying if they didn’t, “we’re really cutting off our nose to spite our face going forward.”
A backdrop to his appearance in North Battleford was the recent run of headlines about crime and drug activity in the vicinity. As minister of justice and Attorney General, Wyant announced the implementation of the recommendations of the Caucus Committee on Crime that Herb Cox had chaired, including the new provincial response team.
Wyant expressed his desire to do more to address the issue.
“We know most crime in this province, and the majority of the crime, is driven by the drug trade. So that’s what we really need to concentrate on in a lot of areas of this province. But in this particular part of the province there’s a continuing problem, and we’ll continue to have dialogues with your mayor, with the local RCMP detachment, to see if there is anything we can do to alleviate that problem.”
Wyant also made the pitch to party members that he was candidate to maintain the party’s coalition of liberals and conservatives going in the coming 2020 election.
“It’s really about unity. It’s about taking the best ideas that have come out of this campaign by all the candidates and building a coalition around it.”
Wyant pledged to “bring all the best ideas together and concentrate on the kinds of things that keep us together as a party and not the things that divide us. If we do that, we’ll continue to be a united party.
