What happened to Saskatchewan? I grew up in a province that was home to the NDP, the cooperative movement, the Wheat Pool, and Medicare. Last year my sister said to me, off-handedly, "Saskatchewan is a right wing province". It startled me, but she's right: the NDP has lost every federal seat that they once held, and the right-wing Saskatchewan Party has a stranglehold on provincial power. Voters don't care about serious financial and political scandals (Global Transportation Hub), or huge financial deficits (Grant Devine conservatives, current Saskatchewan Party), as long as the perpetrators are self-proclaimed conservatives. In 2021 pandemic policy became "Whatever Jason Kenney says". The resulting wave of deaths and the near-collapse of the province's health care system reduced the current premier's popularity, but hasn't brought any real political consequences.
What the f* Saskatchewan?
When I saw this book I grabbed it, hoping for answers.
Sigh.
I didn't want the answer to be "It's because people are stupid and easily led."
To be clear, that's my conclusion, not Eisler's. Eisler blames the NDP itself, after outlining political events in Saskatchewan in some detail from the 1970s through the 2000s. But while the NDP certainly had "fails" (that coalition with the Liberals in 1999 certainly looks daft for both the Liberals and NDP in retrospect), nothing the NDP did or didn't do explains a few mysteries.
Why don't the Saskatchewan people care if conservative governments run deficits? In the 1980s, Grant Devine took Saskatchewan from a surplus to the largest per-capita deficit in the country. Today's Saskatchewan Party has won 4 majority governments in a row while consistently running deficits -- mostly during an era of high commodity prices that should have made running surpluses a piece of cake.
Why don't the Saskatchewan people value competent government? The Romanow government of the 1990s made some hard choices to eliminate the Conservative deficit. But apparently those choices completely destroyed the credibility of the NDP in rural Saskatchewan, despite farmers' supposedly hard-headed pro-business perspective on economic issues, and despite the depopulation of rural communities which made those policies rational. Why didn't the Calvert government of the 2000s get credit for the economic growth that they created? Why does the credit instead go to Brad Wall, who simply continued or doubled-down on NDP economic policies?
Eisler's answer would be that politics in Saskatchewan is essentially populist. Saskatchewanians feel like outsiders in the Canadian federation. They feel that their political and economic interests are subsumed to those of Ontario and Quebec, which gives them a sense of grievance that is core to Saskatchewan identity. Tommy Douglas was successful because of his charisma, and because he understood that sense of grievance and offered a collectivist solution: in Saskatchewan we work together to build a better life in spite of indifferent Easterners and rapacious capitalists. Grant Devine was successful and defeated the fiscally competent Blakeney government (that was focused on the fate of rural communities, no less) because he spoke to people's immediate concerns about affordability (concerns derived from factors that were entirely outside the control of the provincial government). Brad Wall defeated the competent, growth-focused Calvert government because he was charismatic and projected a vision that Saskatchewan could be "more".
In other words, people vote based on emotion, not based on facts. Or, as I prefer to put it, people are stupid and easily led.
Yes, I understand that phrasing the issue in this way means that I don't have a future in politics. But I want politics to be about issues. I want the art of politics to be about figuring out how to implement rational, intelligent policies in a competent way, and political difference to be about differences of opinion about priorities and the relative importance of certain shared values.
Apparently that makes me either an alien or naive.
Eisler certainly belongs to the camp that sees gaining political power as the sole point of politics, and policy simply as a tool to keep that power. I mean, he's not alone: the entire existence of the Liberal Party of Canada is based on those principles, and no political party is without adherents to that philosophy (looking at you Bill Tieleman). But because Eisler doesn't doesn't see politics as being fundamentally about values, he doesn't really address the question of values in his book. And I think that's a real gap.
So I still don't know WTF happened to the province of my birth. Other than to believe that Saskatchewanians are stupid and easily led -- which, given that 40% of them don't believe that climate change is real, might actually be the answer. <tears>
