The un-Saskatchewan Party

You might have heard in the news recently about some issues with federal infrastructure funding for Saskatchewan. Initially, it was reported that the province had some conflicts with how the funding process worked, particularly with money earmarked for public transportation (something that is supposedly not a priority for the Sask government, despite it being so for Regina and Saskatoon, but that's beside the point). It is now looking like the province actually failed to meet the deadline for submitting formal requests for funding.

So what is the reasoning behind this? It would be easy to say that incompetence was the cause, but it is actually much worse. For the past several years, it has been looking more and more like this is a strategy being borrowed from conservative US States (i.e. Republican-controlled States refusing funding for Medicaid expansion) and other Canadian provinces (i.e. the Progressive Conservative government in Manitoba refusing to return carbon pricing proceeds to their public schools or Doug Ford's conservative government's purposeful slow-rolling of infrastructure projects).

So why would any government blatantly shoot itself in the foot like this? It is all about marketing and political theatre. If a government can keep the spotlight off of themselves and on a different target, then they can avoid scrutiny and accountability for their own failings. This is a classic but deceptive political game and the people of Saskatchewan are falling for it right now, partly due to the history between Western Canada and Ottawa but also because the truth is losing out in the current information war we are facing, thanks to the nature of social media and of human psychology.

Humans typically have a short term memory, and are tribal - in that they stick to groups they are most comfortable with. If the Sask Party is good at anything, it is taking advantage of these inherent traits that are in all of us by putting a wedge between us and those of whom they want us to perceive as the opposition. Successful governments would have a record to point to to maintain their support, but since the oil and potash resource boom - which has had nothing to do with a particular political party being in power - the current Saskatchewan government has had very little to pump their chest about:

The provincial debt has more than doubled since the Sask Party has taken office, while our savings have been completely wiped out. More Canadians are leaving our province than are arriving here, while births and international migration are the only thing keeping our population growing. The economy has fallen flat and because of the shortsighted decision to lower taxes during a boom which was obviously not going to last forever, the budget has been starving for revenue, causing our credit rating to be dropped multiple times in recent years. And cost of living has skyrocketed resulting in increasing household debt and growing numbers of home foreclosures, and not because of any federal policies or taxes - which have gone down for most - but because job and salary growth has been poor ever since the resource boom ended (remember that the oil market is global - the world doesn't want or need our expensive oil and no amount of pipelines would help us right now).

It thus makes sense the Sask Party would want the attention taken off of their failure to do anything resembling any sort of responsible governance. Without a real list of accomplishments, a narcissistic government must pass blame on to another target, whether it is immigrants, environmentalists, union-workers, teachers, progressives, governments of the past, or in this case, the current federal government. After all, this is the basis of populist conservative governments: pander to the apathetic majority, stall any progress and turn back the clocks to make it easier to extract our wealth for their friends and corporate donors. Knowing all this, we would be fools to let this continue in Saskatchewan, or even worse, let it happen federally.