Saskatchewan Party Leader Scott Moe speaks to the media during a scrum after a televised leaders' debate in Regina, on Oct. 16. A Sask Party re-election would ensure that it continues to be the longest-serving provincial government in Canada today.Heywood Yu/The Canadian Press
Bill Waiser is a historian, author and two-time Governor-General’s Literary Award winner.
The Saskatchewan Party is chasing history. In calling an election for Oct. 28, its Leader, Scott Moe, is seeking a fifth consecutive majority mandate for his party – something that has happened only twice before in the province. And the polls suggest that the Sask Party will win a majority, with 338Canada setting the odds at 99 per cent.
A Sask Party re-election would also ensure that it continues to be the longest-serving provincial government in Canada today. There’s even talk of the Sask Party assuming the New Democratic Party’s mantle as Saskatchewan’s “natural governing party.”
That would have been nearly impossible to imagine when the Saskatchewan Party was formed in 1997. At the time, creating a coalition of Liberal and Progressive Conservative MLAs was seen as the only way to topple the NDP and end its dominance over Saskatchewan politics. In fact, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation – the forerunner of the NDP – was the last party to win five consecutive elections during its 20-year reign between 1944 and 1964. Tommy Douglas, who led the CCF leader to those majority victories, holds the distinction of serving 17 years as premier, the longest tenure of any provincial party leader.
But Douglas’s CCF doesn’t hold the record that Mr. Moe might want to overtake: the most consecutive majority election victories.
The Saskatchewan Liberal Party forged the first and longest dynasty in the province in the early 20th century, enjoying power for almost a quarter-century. Despite a series of challenges, including the Great War and the reformist Progressive movement, the Liberals won six consecutive majorities in 1905, 1908, 1912, 1917, 1921 and 1925.
There was a great deal of federal-provincial exchange among those early provincial Liberal leaders, too. Saskatchewan’s first and second premiers, Walter Scott and William Martin respectively, both sat in the House of Commons as Liberal backbenchers before entering provincial politics. Charles Dunning and Jimmy Gardiner, for their parts, went from the Saskatchewan premiership to the Liberal cabinet table in Ottawa: Dunning was finance minister in William Lyon Mackenzie King’s government, and Gardiner served both King and Louis St. Laurent as minister of agriculture for more than two decades.
What’s often forgotten about this Regina-Ottawa Liberal connection was that King, Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, represented a Saskatchewan riding for much of his career. He was the MP for Prince Albert for 19 of his 27 years as federal Liberal Party leader, and for 14 of the nearly 22 years he served as prime minister.
All that history shows that there have been many routes to becoming a Saskatchewan political powerhouse. The Liberals offered a distinctive brand of prairie liberalism under a large political umbrella. The CCF under Tommy Douglas tabled a remarkable 16 consecutive balanced budgets, while introducing several social-welfare measures. And the Saskatchewan Party secured power in 2007 with a growth agenda and rode a wave of resource wealth to popular heights under previous leader Brad Wall.
But 17 years later, it’s a tired government, dogged by controversy and a sense of entitlement, if not hubris. While the province faces spiralling crises in health and education, Mr. Moe is engaged in a cold war with Ottawa, and blames the Trudeau Liberals at every opportunity.
He has also moved the party further to the right in a thinly veiled attempt to outmanoeuvre the upstart Saskatchewan United Party. His foray into sexual-identity politics has been taken straight out of the playbook of the American religious right, and it’s been accompanied by the uniquely Canadian use of the notwithstanding clause to override Charter rights. This strategy has meant courting vaccine opponents, western separatists, and conspiracy theorists at the cost of the party’s Liberal DNA. As a result, many sitting Sask Party MLAs, including cabinet ministers, have headed for the exits.
The party’s record may not play well in the province’s urban centres, but its new tune is intended to be heard by the preponderance of rural constituencies. That’s how Mr. Moe hopes to win the election against an NDP that has grown in popularity in recent years.
If Mr. Moe wants to make Saskatchewan electoral history – and establish his party as a bedrock institution of the province – they need to win two more majority victories to match the 24-year uninterrupted reign of the Liberals. But then again, there is arguably no institution more important in Saskatchewan than the Roughriders football club. And even the Riders have a stake in the election outcome: They have only won the Grey Cup – in 1966, 1989, 2007 and 2013 – when the NDP was not in power.