Thursday, October 25, 2007

Election update

I'm starting to think that the question of this election is not going to be how many seats will the NDP lose, but rather, how many seats will they keep?
So far Brad Wall is doing an excellent job of keeping the more shall-we-say 'controversial" Sask Party ideologues out of the public eye -- you know, the ones who don't think crown corporations should be profitable, who reportedly once called the Charter of Rights and Freedoms "garbage" , who think TILMA is just a great idea, who don't support the PA pulp mill deal, etc.
The Sask Party platform is full of pointless micromanagement -- they're going to "work with school boards" to "increase healthy food options in schools" -- as well as pointless union-busting -- they're going to set up a "Premier's Council on Health Care Workplace Issues" which is supposed to discuss issues like the ratio of full-time to part-time staff and other "work-related issues that affect health care providers." Oh, and they're going to "work with the federal government" to "secure a Saskatchewan Energy Accord modeled on the Atlantic Accord, or its financial equivalent" -- yeah, that'll happen.
Meanwhile, here's the NDP presiding over the best Saskatchewan economy in the last quarter century, and they brought us Al Gore and the Rolling Stones and the Junos and the Geminis -- and they don't get no respect. The Sask Party frames the NDP as tired and old, and the NDP platform comes across that way -- when a party has been in power 16 years, it can't really blame its predecessor anymore and it doesn't really have a good answer to the question of why they didn't do it already?

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