I Was Right.
Like, so right it's almost scary. So, one more time folks - let's go over the betrayals, the rot, and what Saskatchewan must demand from its leaders now.
Eight years ago, I called out the Sask Party’s empty core: all spin, no substance, contempt for scrutiny, and abandonment of the very people who built their path to power.
Here’s the truth - at the time I wrote this, I had no idea Brad Wall had already told his caucus that he was about to quit.
They thought I knew, but I didn’t. I just knew that after his 2016 landslide, nothing about Wall was the same anymore and everything felt like it was about to change.
Make no mistake - today I would know. But in 2017? I was still friends with Wall, though not publicly.
I always liked Brad, until he proved he was just another greedy freak.
So let’s keep in mind that in 2017, as Brad Wall exited, criticism of the Sask Party was already being treated by the Government of Saskatchewan as treason.
Today, as Premier Scott Moe battles for his political life and infighting rips the Sask Party apart from within, I stand even more battered and beat up than I ever dreamed I would be back in 2017… but it was all worth it, because I am fully vindicated.
Everything I wrote in 2017 for Maclean’s about the Saskatchewan Party’s damaged brand has now crystallized into crisis, exposing truths the government and its cheerleaders spent years deflecting and denying.
So… one more time:
I was RIGHT.
I was more right than I even understood at the time.
What follows is not an exercise in gloating (okay yeah, a little), but a testimony to what happens when style drowns out substance and the governing party of Saskatchewan full-blown conflates its own press with reality.
From the moment Brad Wall became a “brand,” governance in Saskatchewan became spectacle. Reams of taxpayer cash spent on marketing consultants, propaganda galore, million of advertising dollars to control newsrooms, the parade of ribbon cuttings and made-for-media stunts.
In a nutshell, the myth being promoted was that by keeping Saskatchewan visible, by wrapping its politicians in sunny narratives and branded pageantry, growth and progress would handle themselves.
From its inception, the Sask Party has been largely performative, a means to capture votes in a province weary of stagnation and seeking an alternative to the NDP. I know, because I spent the Sask Party’s first four years in government with a front row seat, participating in the performance.
While government newsrooms hummed, the real Saskatchewan was being neglected: battered infrastructure, towns facing doctor and nurse shortages, teachers on the picket line, and First Nations communities chronically under-resourced.
Brad’s folksy bullshit drowned out grit, and questioning the narrative was treated as subversive. In the end, not even Wall’s flashiest new pin-striped suit could obscure the rot he’d weakly allowed to wholly consume his administration by the time he left.
You didn’t think Brad Wall was ever actually in charge, did you?
Oh honey, bless your heart.
Because the Sask Party’s real purpose has never been to serve the public, but to wipe out any Opposition and achieve dynastic power, it cemented the narrative that only Sask Party insiders could “modernize” Saskatchewan, no matter the cost to the taxpayer or the community.
The performative populism then gave way to extractive populism, with Wall’s priorities shifting to the oil and gas sectors and other resource-based interests that now fund his own performative cowboy lifestyle, sacrificing the rural and working-class base that built his party’s foundation.
For years, the Sask Party has boasted superior fiscal discipline, cherry-picking select indicators like debt-to-GDP ratios and infrastructure spending.
Its answer to every structural problem? Next year - at the same time Wall was promising us Saskatchewan no longer represented “next year country”.
Right out in the open the Sask Party government has routinely obfuscated, scheduling fiscal updates for holiday periods, hoping to dodge public scrutiny. Debt ballooned while unnecessary mega projects like the GTH, Sask Power’s carbon capture, and the empty multi-billion dollar road around Regina burned through our cash. Failed P3 projects and the disastrous “Lean” health care efficiency initiative cost the province at least $40 million and produced zip in return.
We know this.
Consulting costs soared more than 200% in less than a decade while public services suffered from rollover cuts and chronic underfunding. Expensive privatization experiments, like the Information Services Corporation and liquor store sell-off, transferred profits to private hands, draining tens of millions in annual tax revenue.
Rural Saskatchewan, once the engine of Sask Party strength, got nothing but betrayal: fewer doctors, shuttered ERs, and lost jobs while Wall and Moe’s friends got rich.
High-profile failures like the cancellation of the Integrated Agriculture Complex near Regina and a disastrous merger in the agribusiness sector cost the province billions in revenue and hundreds of ag-related jobs.
In fact the Sask Party is killing off rural Saskatchewan like nothing else ever has, by throttling its access to healthcare.
This isn’t complicated folks.
Good Saskatchewan people today are lying six feet underground instead of enjoying their Thanksgiving with family, because Scott Moe’s Sask Party’s lack of compassion, decency and competency ended their lives.
Yes, that is the truth.
No government in Saskatchewan history has so ruthlessly courted - then so readily abandoned - its rural voters. Even Grant Devine kept up the facade til the end.
Rural hospital closures increased, primary care physicians declined, and healthcare outcomes fell behind national standards, leading to longer travel times for basic emergencies and a worrisome decrease in registered nurses operating outside major centers.
Rural and working-class voters, once the heartbeat of the Sask Party coalition, were alienated as their interests were repeatedly sidelined in favor of the same energy sector developers who now pad Brad Wall’s bank account with millions of dollars.
The desperate power grabs, the purges of dissent - of course it all imploded. It was never sustainable. The Saskatchewan Party became allergic to scrutiny, incapable of renewal, and addicted to narrative control.
Local voices lost out to the Sask Party’s dogged consolidation of centralized power in the premier’s hands - as he surrounds himself with angry, cross-eyed little boys, not public policy experts - delivering nothing more than broken trust and anger to communities that once banked on the Sask Party to protect jobs and services.
The breakdown of internal unity - now front-page news - was inevitable, given the Sask Party’s history of brand-first leadership.
Now, as the knives come out for Scott Moe, former allies have become open critics. Infighting is public, discipline is crumbling, and the Sask Party’s liberal-conservative coalition has revealed itself as fake. This implosion was not only predictable; it was prophesied. The Party long ago ceased tolerating scrutiny, internal or external, and has now lost the agility to renew itself when the cracks finally split open.
Its inability to process dissent, encourage debate, or welcome scrutiny has produced an insular, loyalty-based executive culture. MLAs defected, some publicly, and next month’s leadership review has devolved into “all-out war”, as Randy put it, with party members divided over Premier Scott Moe’s future, yet resigned to his inevitable reign til 2028.
Former Sask Party insiders are slowly beginning to step forward to reveal that harassment, intimidation, and patronage has been the default mode, typically doled out by unelected proxies. Communal punishment has been the result for anyone who questioned the party’s direction or the wisdom of its shit leadership, hidden and in plain sight.
I will let those folks tell their own stories, but they know they have my support if they need it.
This collapse mirrors exactly what I predicted in 2017: when power is built upon myth and exclusion, even small fractures rapidly become existential threats.
For the last eight years, the Sask Party under Scott spent public dollars to insulate and aggrandize its brand, all while the underlying foundation eroded.
It did nothing else.
Everything I forecast in 2017 came true: the brand was a façade, the populism was hollow, financial stewardship was a smokescreen, and rural Saskatchewan bore the cost.
Saskatchewan’s governing class also appears determined to cement a culture where even the chain of accountability is broken.
After my 2017 piece ran in Maclean’s, then-Minister of Finance Kevin Doherty allegedly wrote this infamous, vitriolic response, attacking me personally, not what I wrote.
A few months ago, Mr Doherty creeped into my DMs, demanding I contact him because his “friends” said I didn’t like him and I was to answer how that was possible, given I’ve never met him.
I responded saying that was hilarious, given he wrote a public letter trashing me in front of the whole country, and all without meeting me, either.
A few weeks later Doherty sued me. The basis of his claim is that because he wrote that letter to Maclean’s about me, anything I write about him must be malicious.
Lol. Seriously.
Can you imagine?
By that logic, Donald Trump can just go ahead and shut down all newspapers, Substacks, broadcasts, social media and public commentary now. It’s the exact same principle.
So I decided that it was finally time to submit a Freedom of Information (FOI) request about that letter to the Ministry of Finance and Executive Council (home to the premier’s office and government communications). That letter should never have gone public without passing through at least those two offices.
Here’s the answers I received.
(When I told Jocelyn her answer was “nonsense” she replied with a lecture on how she didn’t have to put up with workplace violence 😂.)
Perhaps Doherty’s letter was written with a Crayon and sent by carrier pigeon.
Normally, it would strain belief that a Sask Party minister could orchestrate a national character attack on a Saskatchewan resident and leave not a single paper trail.
But I was not surprised at the response; I absolutely believe there are no records.
Even at the time, I strongly suspected that letter wasn’t written by Doherty or even anyone in the Government of Saskatchewan. You know exactly who I believe it was written and orchestrated by: one of Doherty’s longtime bffs. A man who feared me (and #MeToo) (and still does) so much that he’d already, by that point, made it his public, personal mission to destroy my life.
Of course, I gave the responses from the Saskatchewan government to my FOI requests to my lawyer.
Again, Doherty made his Maclean’s letter the centrepiece of his lawsuit.
I cannot WAIT to hear, from the stand, how his office managed to go back and forth multiple times with a national media outlet on humiliating the same Saskatchewan woman he went on to harass with a bogus lawsuit blaming her for his behaviour - because alas, no records exist of any of it.
I’m pretty sure I’ll be waiting for a while.
My “mediation” with Mr Doherty, during which I invited him to shove his demands up his ass, was over a month ago.
Not a peep since.
Doherty’s letter to Maclean’s was and remains confirmation that, just like it is today, my criticism of the Sask Party was warranted.
I speak truth to powerful, yet such weak Saskatchewan men and they fucking hate me for it.
I don’t care. At all.
I am fully vindicated by the very crisis the Sask Party faces today. If they’d listened to instead of attacking me, they’d be in a better place today.
Here’s what the legacy-obsessed political class - the likes of every current and former Sask Party politician, publicly-registered lobbyist and hack - have never seemed to grasp: no matter how desperately they curate their images, hold self-indulgent, fart-sniffing “fireside chats”, flex their nonexistent muscles and try to rewrite their pathetic records, their reputations ultimately belong to us.
They can try, but history isn’t written by insecure old men clinging to their microphones, silently trying to pray away a swollen prostate. They can hold on to every self-flattering myth, but it’s independent voices like mine - people who know them, and who won’t be bullied into silence - who will write their legacies.
And when all these guys’ stories are finally told - the story of the Mediocre Saskatchewan Men (almost like I already have a draft) whose greed and stupidity ruined this place - it won’t be a fairy tale.
Period.
Politics, like prairie winters and my capacity for holding a grudge for the rest of my natural life (and yours), are unyielding.
The Sask Party’s stories and spin can’t survive the facts any longer.
To public servants in the Saskatchewan government still trying to bury dissent and operate behind closed doors - your reckoning is arriving and some of you dumb fucks are going to go to jail.
After Grant Devine, people of Saskatchewan deserved honesty, humility, and vision. What they got was a con (and inexplicably, Grant Devine on the University of Saskatchewan’s board of governors).
From the smoldering wreckage, the lesson is already becoming clear:
FAFO.
As you sit around your dinner tables this weekend, remember the truth about Saskatchewan’s future depends on voices willing to call out power, not just stand back and watch it implode.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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