I didn't get a lot of sleep in the days immediately following Christmas, and I blame it all on John Gormley.
Under the tree for this scribe was Gormley's new book, Left Out - Saskatchewan's NDP and the Relentless Pursuit of Mediocrity, launched in October 2010.
It was uniquely intriguing for me because I was the political reporter for the Battlefords News-Optimist during much of the time the book focuses on, namely the Calvert years in government.
I found that a bit odd, because Gormley came back to Saskatchewan to start a talk show in the late 1990s, firmly in the Roy Romanow era. Most people would think that as a premier, Romanow has had the most impact over the last 20 years, and yet Gormley all but ignores him. That tells me either Gormley had a begrudging respect for Romanow, or he didn't have much to attack. From my interpretation of the book, I'm leaning towards respect.
The time covered in Left Out brought back a lot of memories. I was there on election night in both 2003 and 2007. I walked door-to-door with candidates. I sat on the bus with Elwin Hermanson briefly during the 2003 campaign, in which he says the Sask. Party brought a knife to a gunfight. I spent countless hours over the years interviewing local NDP MLA and cabinet minister Len Taylor, whose door was always open to me.
More to the point, Gormley grew up in North Battleford, and even quoted some mutual friends in his diatribe.
He had a lot of strong points, particularly on the growth of government spending, from $5.95 billion in 2000-2001 to $8.7 billion in 2007-2008. But he neglects to mention that the Sask. Party government led by Brad Wall saw spending surge to $10.2 billion in 2009-2010.
Gormley devotes an entire chapter to scandals during the Calvert years. That chapter, one of 11, makes up nearly a quarter of the book at 55 pages. Although Gormley points out several of these began under Romanow's watch, he nonetheless hangs them on Calvert. They only came home to roost well after Romanow had retired. The way he writes it, you would think the Calvert government had lurched from scandal to scandal, and was incapable of anything else.
Upon closer examination, however, many of these so-called scandals were not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Indeed, except for dyed-in-the-wool politicos, most of these would be long forgotten. Many were the result of justice officials or bureaucrats, and do not rightly deserve to hang on the NDP's neck.
I don't mean to sound like an apologist here, I'm not. But Gormley is making mountains out of molehills, which is what you need to do to fill several hours of air time on a daily call-in radio show. You have to remain in a constant state of indignation.
The one scandal that did stand out for me was "The Hillson Misadventure." North Battleford MLA Jack Hillson took a leave of absence from his job as head of the Battlefords Legal Aid office to run for politics as allowed under the Labour Standards Act. When he was un-elected, he rightly asked for his job back, but didn't get it. He was essentially screwed out of that job, and rightly took Legal Aid, and by extension, the Calvert government, to court. He won handily, and there was palpable egg on the Justice Department's face. I asked a lot of hard questions about that case, and never got satisfactory answers.
This plays to the theme of Gormley's book - the idea that the Saskatchewan NDP never forget who their friends, or enemies, are. Because they are the natural governing party in this province, they will always get you in the end, Gormley implies. He tells of long-time NDP MLA Eiling Kramer of North Battleford, "a large, loud, imposing figure who won seven straight elections."
"A particular trick of Kramers' - especially when the NDP was under siege and the voters were becoming angry - was to visit local businesspeople who'd decided to take a stand against the government. He'd remind them that he controlled 2,000 unionized workers at a nearby mental hospital and if local NDP-friendly civil servants and unions caught wind of what was going on, 'they might just put you out of business.' That usually quelled dissent pretty quickly," Gormley writes.
He talks of business people afraid to stand up to the NDP, for fear of punishment when they are in power. He likens the business community to battered wives, undergoing "a cycle of abuse built on power and control, forgiveness, apology, the make up, but then the inevitable repetition, co-dependency, enabling and the cycle repeats itself. The only way to stop the cycle is to stop the abuser. For good."
Left Out will be of little interest to those outside of Saskatchewan. But if you've paid attention to Saskatchewan politics from 2000-2007, this is a page-turner you won't put down.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
