The bigger Sask. Party problem as we near a campaign where it will ask us to believe its campaign platform is its pattern of falsehoods.
Oppositions don’t have many advantages going into an election year against a long-serving government, but they do have one:
Governments have far more at stake when they’re caught not telling the truth.
The above may raise the hackles of some who will rightly point out that no political party holds a monopoly on honesty.
This is so, but the brutal truth is voters generally distinguish between the usual dishonest hyperbole we hear in politics and outright lies told by government members and/or staff to justify bad programming, policy or wastes of taxpayer dollars.
And for Saskatchewan NDP Leader Carla Beck and company, the past year has been an embarrassment of riches when it comes to Premier Scott Moe and his cabinet ministers getting caught red-handed spewing untruths.
In isolation, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But the bigger Sask. Party problem as we near a campaign where it will ask us to believe its campaign platform is its pattern of falsehoods.
But the problem for the Sask. Party is a growing sense that this is now government culture.
So even before it was demonstrated — courtesy of a video first obtained by AllSaskatchewan showing tires shipped to the Crumb Rubber Manufacturers’ (CRM) plant near Calgary — that Tell has not been honest, the Sask. Party cabinet already had a well-established record of saying things that were demonstrably untrue.
Maybe this won’t be the biggest thing come October, given that the Sask. Party has carefully framed the campaign around the much bigger issue of the federal government’s carbon tax.
But, three months from now, both the Sask. Party and the NDP will ask voters to believe what they’re promising.
And the Sask. Party’s problem is that its opponents now have plenty of examples of the governing party’s candidates simply not telling the truth.
Mandryk is the political columnist for the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
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