I am feeling nostalgic for Dwayne Lingenfelter.
This isn’t because I necessarily agreed with him, or because I thought he was the best leader that the provincial NDP ever had, but because he would campaign. He campaigned a lot, he travelled the province trying to hit every town he could, talking to everyone who would look at him and generally trying to get people to pay attention to himself and his party. It didn’t work, his defeat in the past election was comprehensive, but at least he tried. Whether or not you agreed with him, you couldn’t fault him for not putting the effort in, and he put a great deal of support behind the candidate from Yorkton at the time, Chad Blenkin.
Contrast this with the provincial election that is coming up soon. The provincial NDP is regarding this riding as an afterthought, not even updating their website until the last minute to reflect a candidate nomination with Greg Olson. The majority of their campaigning seems to be handled by the SGEU rather than the party itself, and in spite of being gifted a couple big scandals by the sitting Saskatchewan Party they haven’t actually done anything to capitalize on them. One often sees people like Progressive Conservative leader Rick Swenson connected to the Regina Bypass land controversies, for example, when this should be a prime opportunity for the provincial NDP to capitalize on something that could potentially swing voters in their direction. Why isn’t the official opposition making a ton of noise about this? Instead, most of the noise is being made by a party which hasn’t had a seat in nearly 20 years.
The NDP has a very specific job here, and it’s not doing it. Whether or not the people of the province agree with them, they need to make noise and at least attempt to hold the government to account. It doesn’t matter if you agree with the NDP, they have to exist, and they have to have a campaign which reminds voters of any issues that might exist with the current provincial government. The opposition must loom in the background to remind the sitting government that if they screw up, the people might dump them to the curb and pick someone else to do their job. It’s as much about reminding everyone that there is an alternative as anything else.
So where are they? Why aren’t they aggressively going to every single town in the province, fighting to get people to pay attention to their candidates and what they represent? Why aren’t they even updating their website? The party is not even doing the absolute bare minimum to engage the hearts and minds of voters in this area, and that’s a bad start for the party. Whether or not you support the Sask Party government, they should at least have to fight for votes, instead of being gifted the election by an opposition that doesn’t appear to have much interest in actually contesting it.
Right now, it should be difficult to turn around without being reminded that there is an official opposition out there and what their issues are at the moment. Soon, we should be surrounded by evidence of different parties trying to grab your attention, whether it’s through signs, television appearances, or ads in these very pages. Instead, I had to go through a surprising amount of effort just to find out who the candidate for this riding even was, and I’ve barely heard anything from either party to discuss what exactly they’re planning for the province for the next four years. People often get election fatigue, of course, and this is especially true after the lumbering monster that was the recent federal election. But given that we’re a little over a month out from the provincial election we would normally expect something to be happening. You don’t realize that a loud election is a good thing until you’ve are confronted with the opposite.
If the Sask Party wins, then it should be because they had to work for it. If they have to put in the effort to win over the people of the province, and win, then that’s democracy. But I firmly believe that a party needs to work for each vote they get, they have to have an opponent that works just as hard as they do, and if they win or lose, it’s because they are the ones whose ideas caught on with the people of a region the most. What it should never be is an easy process, and one party should never just roll over and let their opponent take the prize. That’s why I want to light a fire under Cam Broten and his team, and I want to see an aggressive campaign from them. In turn, I want an aggressive campaign from the Sask Party in response. The election doesn’t mean anything if it is not a case of everyone putting in the maximum amount of effort. Unfortunately, at this moment, that’s not what I’m seeing. Everyone is assuming the election is a foregone conclusion, and as a result we’ve got the quietest election we’ve seen in ages. If we’re not going to put the effort in, it’s bad news for democracy.
