The Saskatchewan Party government has a new mandate stay the course on health care, and spend more time and money chasing the same mirages.
The conventional wisdom is that governments defeat themselves. The idea well runs dry. They lose talent, talk too much and listen too little. Scandals pile up and weigh them down. Cranky voters get bored or lose patience; molehills become mountains.
The liabilities typically pile up by the end of the second term. Occasionally governments survive longer: the economy blooms at the right time, they have a charismatic and admired leader, the opposition fails to connect. Three terms is an achievement. Beyond three is a dynasty.
If conventional wisdom is true, the opposition need only have a pulse to get its turn. It has only to pick up the torch from the incumbents’ cold, dead hands.
Tawdry conflict-of-interest breaches. And a hot mess of a health-care system that voters said was their No. 1 concern.
So why wasn’t this the health-care election? The incumbents ran on their record, which gets top marks for nerve given what the record shows. A litany of problems — primary care access, wait times to see specialists, hallway medicine, vacant positions, morale — have got steadily worse.
Attempted and often expensive solutions largely recycled previous failures. Yet the NDP offered a strangely brief and bland platform that created no daylight between its vision and the government’s. It could have been written by ChatGPT having a so-so day.
It may not have mattered; the Alberta NDP crafted the best primary care renewal platform that I’ve ever seen and it barely blipped on the radar. Perhaps the public no longer believes that any government will fix health care.
So the government has a new mandate stay the course, and spend more time and money chasing the same mirages.
The NDP will ponder whether running as pragmatic centrists rather than bold progressives was the double-edged sword that got them off the floor but also locked in their limits.
The premise of such reflections is that people vote with their minds, not their emotions; inform themselves about party platforms; vote based on policy and rational self-interest; care about the quality of their local candidates; and give no party eternal loyalty.
In Saskatchewan, provincial politics are tribal, and the dominant tribe is conservative — more conservative than Alberta, where the NDP lost by 8.5 percentage points in 2023, and continues to dominate Edmonton the way the Saskatchewan Party owns rural areas.
The NDP got to base camp last month, but the summit is very far away. If the Saskatchewan Party manages a credible renewal of sorts, next time it could recapture some of the urban seats it narrowly lost.
What health care vision and plan, if any, could have loosened the Saskatchewan Party grip on its supporters? The NDP wasn’t going to flip Moose Jaw by promising to reopen the hyperbaric chamber.
In rural areas, where only a massive stampede from the Saskatchewan Party corral could make ridings competitive, parroting the incumbents’ recruitment platitudes wasn’t much of a moon shot.
Elections are a zero-sum game where all the power goes to the winner. The public needs the winner to reimagine health care. Every inquiry and report makes a compelling case for reform, and most Canadians believe radical changes are essential.
The public deserved a debate where at least one side put something hopeful and even inspiringly different on the table.
It didn’t happen. The result is losers all around — the system in disarray, and a public resigned to more of the same.
Steven Lewis spent 45 years as a health policy analyst and health researcher in Saskatchewan. He can be reached at [email protected].
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