Monday, November 5, 2007

"Tired" Sask. NDP faces upset vote on Wednesday

If the Sask. NDP is tired by being in so long imagine what the Conservatives in Alberta must be since they have been in power for decades. They must be on life support! Of course this is typical stereotyped rhetorical nonsense. However, it does seem that the NDP will be voted out on Nov. 7 although this is hardly an upset. The polls have been bad since spring and are no better and last time the NDP just squeaked through. I fear that a more updated version of the Devine govt. is taking power. Enterprise Sask. sounds to be a very dangerous and undemocratic body probably stacked with wall to wall Wall buddies.

'Tired' Saskatchewan NDP government faces upset
Vote on Wednesday

Keith Bonnell
CanWest News Service


Monday, November 05, 2007


In Saskatchewan, you can see a storm coming from a long way off.

By now, Premier Lorne Calvert has spotted the dark clouds spilling over his personal horizon, with pollsters predicting his NDP government will be swept from office in Wednesday's provincial election.

For the New Democrats, the big question is "why." Saskatchewan's economy is thriving, thanks to a resource boom, and more and more former Saskatchewan residents are coming home from oil-rich Alberta.

The experts -- and even Mr. Calvert himself -- say voters may simply be tired of the same old, same old.

"We have occupied the government benches now for 16 years," Mr. Calvert said in an interview with CanWest News Service. "There is, understandably Ithink, a sentiment the opposition can play on, which is the notion of, 'Time for a change.'"

The man poised to dethrone Mr. Calvert and take the province that gave birth to medicare a step to the right is Brad Wall, leader of the pro-business Saskatchewan Party.

"It is a tired old NDP government," said Mr. Wall, whose party had a 20 percentage point lead in a poll released last week.

Mr. Wall said despite its progress, Saskatchewan still has a list of problems.

"The record of the government isn't very good. We have the longest surgical wait times in the country. . . . We have among the fastest-growing rates of child poverty. We've led the nation in crime for the last nine years, and in violent crime for the last eight years, under the NDP."

Observers say the photogenic 41-year-old has been winning the personality battle with Mr. Calvert, a former United Church minister whose easygoing manner was one of his strongest assets when he became premier in 2001.

While Mr. Calvert, 54, was strumming his guitar at a day care during this campaign, Mr. Wall was admitting he'd smoked marijuana in university -- and joking with reporters that he'd have to call his mother before the confession went to air.

"It's got to be incredibly frustrating for the NDP, who have run a competent and reasonably effective, middle-of-the-road government . . . and yet it looks like they're going to be turfed out," said political scientist Ken Ramussen.

"People here are comfortable with NDP policies. They just don't want the NDP delivering them at this point."

It's not that Mr. Calvert hasn't come out swinging on occasion, before and during the campaign.

He took up Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams's clarion call on resource revenue, launching a lawsuit against Ottawa over changes to the equalization formula that Mr. Calvert claims will cost his province hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money. But the issue hasn't caught on like it did in Newfoundland.

On the first day of the campaign, Mr. Calvert rolled out an ambitious $150-million-a-year universal drug program that would see Saskatchewan residents pay no more than $15 per prescription.

Critics have called the plan a waste of money in a province that's struggling to retain doctors and nurses. Mr. Calvert has compared the program to the introduction of socialized medicine in Saskatchewan, and suggested it could spread across the country.

"We're talking about a drug plan that would reach every family in the province," Mr. Calvert said.

"People aren't buying it," said Mr. Ramussen, the director of the Johnson Shoyama graduate school of public policy at the University of Regina.

"(Mr. Calvert) just lacks the real charisma and the ability to sell this to people."

Voter apathy has been a major issue. A recent poll said voters in Regina were more interested in the playoff-bound Saskatchewan Roughriders than the election.

While Mr. Calvert proposed the big-sky ideas, Mr. Wall stuck to the utilitarian. That includes a plan to create Enterprise Saskatchewan, a board that would include members of the private sector to advise the government on economic development.

Mr. Wall said the NDP has proven it can't take full advantage of the current boom.

"Mr. Calvert's answer for health care apparently appears to be cheap painkillers while you wait a year or longer for surgery," he said. "Saskatchewan has more resources than most nations, never mind other provinces. We should be aspiring to be permanently a 'have' province, to be on the vanguard of the country."

The Saskatchewan Party was founded a decade ago by members of the Progressive Conservative and Liberal parties as a centre-right alternative to the NDP government.

Mr. Wall has been an MLA since 1999 and took the reins of the party in 2004. In the late 1980s, he was a founding member of the Alliance for the Future of Young Canadians, an organization dedicated to promoting free trade.

Joe Garcea, a politics professor at the University of Saskatchewan, said a Saskatchewan Party government would find itself with some new bargaining power with Ottawa.

"The federal Conservative government will be so happy the Saskatchewan Party will have gotten into power," Garcea said. "They are likely to accommodate Mr. Wall's demands."

Mr. Wall has said his party would take a second look at the equalization lawsuit. "There needs to be a reasonable expectation that we can win," he has said, adding he'd rather focus on getting needed infrastructure funding from Ottawa.

The NDP held a slim 30-to-28 seat majority when the election was called.









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