A budget 19 months in advance of the next provincial election campaign should be starting to give us a clue as to what that campaign will be about.
But it’s what we heard in Monday’s question period, rife with snarling over past arrests and political ties to radicalism, that really gave us a clue as to what the October 2020 provincial election campaign may be like.
Scott Moe and Ryan Meili may not personally dislike each other. But it’s pretty clear the Saskatchewan Party and NDP don’t share much love.
And when the premier and Opposition get into issues like the yellow vest rallies, it’s only likely to fuel that political animosity until the writ is dropped.
Interestingly, the one whose image is likely to suffer the most from this is Moe, which makes one wonder why he wouldn’t see the wisdom of abiding by Meili’s reasonable request that the Saskatchewan government cut all ties to potentially image-harming elements like the yellow vest movement.
Why Moe wouldn’t do this anyway is confounding.
After all, the Sask. Party is an alliance of old PCs and Liberals, and keeping that alliance intact requires occasionally leaning at bit left, as they may have done in Wednesday’s budget.
While it’s a shoddy excuse for failing to always immediately denounce right-wing racism or other extremism, it can be argued that federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer may have to worry about bleeding far-right support to Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada. Moe has no such problem.
This week, the right thing for Moe would have been to at least start messaging that extreme views like…
