Here's 3 Issues From 2022 That Will Still Matter Alot in 2023
It's not an exhaustive list, by any means, but have to start somewhere.
At first this was going to be one of those “Top Stories of…” pieces.
Then I realized that’s not the world we live in anymore.
Once upon a time, you could look back at a year and pinpoint moments, or news stories, that punctuated and defined it. In hindsight, what lied between those key junctures was something resembling blessed calm. Stretches of time that felt like normalcy, or far closer to it than we are today.
I think it’s fair to say that to many if not most, those times now feel long gone.
If you live a life today that feels recognizable, or has somehow remained relatively unchanged over the past few years, I’m happy for you, but know that you are part of a cohort that is privileged and few in numbers. For the vast majority of us, the drama and trauma of the last couple of years has had at least some negative impact on one or more aspects of our lives.
Back in the day, if you took one year of news content and turned it into an ECG strip, that strip would have read like a really slow heartbeat: flat, flat…boop!….flat, flat… flat…boop!
Each boop!, or beat, was a story that jumped out to us. Election results. A massive storm. Columbine. An act of terror. Foot-and-mouth disease*. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Riders won a Grey Cup.
*I lived in the UK in 2001. It didn’t actually occur to me until I wrote that line and thought back on it for the first time in forever, how absolutely f**ked up that was 😅🤭🥴. My job dictated regular travel by train between north and south England; very quickly into that crisis, stiff-legged and hooved pyres of dead livestock, before or after combustion, became part of the otherwise really beautiful and quaint rural British landscape.
Anyway.
Today that news ECG would just be a flat line, because at some point in recent years the heart exploded.
The 12-month chunk of time we just wrapped was another year of chaos, marked by belches of increased crises, whether real and impacting your daily life (lack of access to timely medical treatment) or manufactured (#Trudeauwatertesting #neverforget) and thereby actually acknowledged by the Sask Party.
There have been many, many cringeworthy, rock bottom (or so you thought) moments, to be sure. I think Colin Thatcher is likely one that will stand out for many readers of this blog, but to me that wasn’t news. That was a mirror.
I’ll let you decide who should be holding it.
The best way to describe the three themes I’ve chosen from 2022 is that I feel they have the most potential to continue to impact the future of Saskatchewan, in 2023 and beyond.
Spoiler alert (not really): that’s not a good thing.
1. Saskatchewan’s Ministry of “Education”
Yeah I’m putting it in quotes, because what our kids are getting is decidedly not that.
I was only going to write about the Christian school scandals, but as I reread stories from 2022 it became abundantly clear that like everything else, the disintegration of K-12 education in Saskatchewan is so much more than one issue.
With a population so small and access to extraordinary first-world resources, imagine what exciting and visionary educational initiatives we could be exploring if the Sask Party was as interested in bettering our kids’ futures as that of Scott Moe’s friends and party political donors.
Instead, the last people on earth the Sask Party and its “education" ministry are here for is this province’s kids.
Maybe our first clue something is wrong should have been that Dustin Duncan’s Ministry of “Education” generates a “business plan” for K-12 education every spring, as opposed to just one that would make the next public school year the best ever for Saskatchewan kids.
Education is not a business.
It’s unthinkable that schools in Saskatchewan facing ongoing, credible allegations of abusing not just public funds, but public trust and the children your tax dollars were paying them to turn over their knee “educate” are still operational, but they are.
Under the shadow of what is increasingly looking a lot like political interference, Bronwyn Eyre’s Ministry of Justice and its Crown prosecutors have somehow not yet laid charges against the men and and women accused of criminal behaviour who also happen to be the Sask Party’s friends, relatives and political supporters and own government.
Against the backdrop of those horrors, the fact that the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation (STF) (yes they still exist, apparently) deemed the Government of Saskatchewan’s 2022-23 K-12 budget “very disappointing” seems inconsequential and irrelevant.
That wide swaths of Saskatchewan schools were and still are facing unprecedented student absenteeism rates of up to 60%, thanks largely to the Sask Party’s unskilled political interference in public health affairs resulting in skyrocketed rates of influenza transmission amongst children requiring hospitalization… has caused barely a ripple in Saskatchewan’s public consciousness.
My best advice for advocates of public K-12 education in Saskatchewan is prepare to get a lot louder in 2023 than you were in 2022, because as the health care system continues to collapse, ensuring your message is heard over the howls of distress from doctors and medical professionals is going to become increasingly difficult.
2. Saskatchewan’s Ukraine Response
Before you read any further, zip over to the New York Times and watch this short, free documentary that is the result of an eight-month, open source, visual investigation into the war crimes committed in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha in March 2022.
It reveals, in horrific, undeniable detail, that the perpetrators of the March massacre that killed almost 500 residents in Bucha were Russian paratroopers from its 234th Air Assault Regiment; cold-blooded killers led by a monster named Lt. Col. Artyom Gorodilov.
You need to watch the last moments of beloved sons, fathers and brothers about to get a bullet in the back of the head for having the audacity to work at a community-based checkpoint on Yablunska Street, a vital corridor that runs into the heart of Kiev.
Observe the few Ukrainians who opted to scurry through Bucha’s streets, barely escaping certain, grizzly death had they not decided to run at the last minute. Perhaps they were questioning whether they were overreacting as they ran from the Russian tanks rolling into their neighborhood.
Narrator: “They were not overreacting.”
I’m willing to bet that nobody ever thinks this can happen to them, even up until the point the gun touches their head.
Since I first saw these pictures, the image of guy in the brown coat, hands tied, flashes into my head every once in a while. Obviously all of it is horrific, but that guy, in what I think might be a Carhardt winter jacket, dark denim and trainers, reminds me of a typical Saskatchewan millennial, like the one you see having a dart outside Amigo’s or Leopold’s on a Thursday night.
As that guy and his friends and neighbours were being executed in Ukraine, what was the Saskatchewan government doing?
On March 7, 2022, on and around the same day many of these atrocities were being committed in Bucha, both Sask Party and Saskatchewan NDP MLAs spent seven freaking hours in the Legislative Assembly congratulating themselves in one of the most macabre, tacky demonstrations of political pontification I’ve ever seen.
What has the Sask Party government done since?
I guarantee that we will be back here a year from now, reflecting on further consequences of this macabre experiment. An experiment that is being conducted and legitimized by Moe, Harrison and the Sask Party off the backs of dead Ukrainians, like the guy in the brown coat.
The sheer reprehensibility of war profiteering used to provoke public outrage and accusations of racial or religious discrimination when it was manifest. It still does outside of Saskatchewan, AKA the real world.
For example, the European Union has had more than enough of America doing exactly what Saskatchewan is doing, though even Joe Biden isn’t stupid enough to actually brag about it.
Moe can be as grossly braggadocious as he wants because a terrifyingly wide swath of Saskatchewan people have been gaslit into moral bankruptcy while the rest of the world doesn’t know or care who he is.
That’s how, in part, thousands of Ukrainian passport holders have poured into Saskatchewan under the guise, and for a very few, the reality, that they have been forced out of their homes by Russian missiles and the war in general.
The vast majority of Ukrainian passport holders actually displaced by Russian aggression are not the ones arriving in Saskatchewan. You’ve had more than enough evidence put in front of you to accept that. I am not the only one bearing witness to this situation right now.
I suggest you read more about the Sunflower Network here. It’s just one initiative behind the transport of Ukrainians, the vast majority of whom were not living in Ukraine when it was attacked by Russia, to Saskatchewan as economic migrants.
Saskatchewan’s so-called Ukrainian response has been racist, grossly political and self-serving and ultimately fraudulent. When hindsight emerges and that fact is clear, it will be one of Saskatchewan’s greatest shames.
That takes effort.
I’ve written more than enough on why and how this initiative is not only wildly unethical and misleading, but unsustainable. Expect to hear more in 2023 as this continues to unravel.
3. How many more?
Has the Prime Minister laid a wreath after a massacre anywhere else in Canada besides Saskatchewan… where he’s had to do it twice?
Yes there have been horrific tragedies in Canada during Justin Trudeau’s tenure, but I can’t find any record of him having to lay a wreath after a mass murder anywhere else in Canada except here.
Twice.
This is, of course, in reference to Myles Sanderson and the lives he viciously cut short on the James Smith Cree Nation just a few months ago. However, it’s really not about Myles Sanderson. Or wreaths.
It’s about ripping open before the world, once again, the deep, festering wounds plaguing our province’s Indigenous communities.
Wounds that are not healing.
Saskatchewan people - white people’s - ongoing lack of empathy and inaction in supporting our own neighbours, in any way we can, in addressing the heartbreaking, chronically-fatal litany of issues stemming from wounds our white forebears inflicted on theirs - still to our white-privileged benefit today - is disturbing, embarrassing and disgraceful.
Apparently the hundreds of, if not thousands at this point, of untimely deaths related to the suicide epidemic on-reserve and in northern Saskatchewan communities aren’t enough.
They weren’t enough for Premier Clown Shoes to get off his ass and walk across the street, yet were also so much that he tried as hard as he could to make them go away.
It’s not about Myles Sanderson, it’s about racism.
We are seeing extraordinary levels of successful leadership from Indigenous chiefs and other directors and heads of Indigenous organizations in Saskatchewan.
In 2023 you will see increased interest in Indigenous issues from the Sask Party, which will have absolutely nothing to do with an interest in bettering things for Indigenous people, but everything to do with frantically shoving social capital - and your tax dollars - into the province’s oil and gas sector.
Investment in Saskatchewan’s Indigenous economy, strategically increasing Indigenous residents’ capacity for participating in economic development, particularly in resource-based industries isn’t just the right thing, it’s the smart, responsible and prudent thing to do.
Naturally, the Sask Party government has no intention of bothering with outcomes for any of that part. Of bothering with outcomes that are good for anyone but themselves. More on that later.
For paid subscribers, here’s more on what other important Saskatchewan conversations we’re going to be having in the coming weeks as months as well:
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