“The New Democratic Party may be experiencing a comeback in Saskatchewan, if this years annual convention, which is being highlighted by the selection of a new leader, can be used as a guideline.”
- July 4, 1970, Saskatoon Star Phoenix
Had you there for a moment, didn’t I?
"Delegates to the CCF-NDP convention Friday morning were quick to give a standing ovation to Provincial Treasurer Woodrow Lloyd when he was elected political leader…The applause, cheers and victory song for Mr. Lloyd continued for about 10 minutes.” Nov 04, 1961, Regina Leader-Post
In 1961, Woodrow Lloyd was the only candidate on the ballot to replace Tommy Douglas, but had been campaigning anyway. He faced an 11th hour contender at the convention but won easily with 75% of the vote.
1970’s NDP leadership race sounded positively scandalous.
“The dramatic closeness of Saturday's Saskatchewan NDP leadership vote left delegates and observers limp, sweat drenched, and drained of emotion.” - November 6, 1970, Regina Leader-Post
Oh my.
After everyone showered and exchanged phone numbers, Allan Blakeney won over Roy Romanow with 54% of the vote.
In 1987 Romanow was acclaimed. Like Lloyd, Romanow campaigned hard anyway, delivering 65 speeches in five weeks before the convention. Romanow made no apologies for telling the NDP membership that he wasn’t interested in navel-gazing bullshit.
"I'm telling the party at every speaking engagement we're going to put up for review all of our programs for the 70s, and our approaches from the 70s. They were good by and large for that period. Today, they may not be so good." - Roy Romanow, November 7, 1987, Saskatoon Star Phoenix
“During his leadership travels around the province the last month, Romanow has likened the lethargy to the NDP being in a comfortable pew. It is a nice way of saying the party has not challenged itself by honestly confronting the issues of the 1980s and proposing intellectually sound solutions.” - November 6, 1987, Regina Leader-Post
Despite Romanow’s relative success, by 2001 there were already signs the inner sanctum of the NDP was falling out of touch with the general public.
Saskatchewan people would prefer Chris Axworthy to win Saturday’s NDP leadership race and become their new NDP premier…, (he) would be five times more likely to sway leaning voters to vote NDP than perceived NDP leadership frontrunner Lorne Calvert, the survey of 1,208 Saskatchewan residents conducted from Sunday until Wednesday shows. Jan 26, 2001, Regina Leader-Post
The next day, the membership rejected the general public’s assessment and Calvert defeated Axworthy after six hours and five rounds of voting, taking 58% of the vote to replace Romanow as premier. If Elwin Hermanson hadn’t been as bad as he was, Calvert probably wouldn’t have won the one term he did in 2003.
1000 people attended 2001’s NDP convention at Saskatoon’s Prairieland Park.
There were 18,500 mail-in ballots counted.
2009’s NDP leadership convention was bizarre - trust me, I was there. Fresh-faced newcomer Ryan Meili and his extremely loyal supporters went up against Dwain Lingenfelter in the second round of voting after Yen Pedersen and Deb Higgins dropped in the first.
The event was held at a packed Regina’s Queensbury Convention Centre. Link’s walk-on music was a guitar squealing 80s throwback and Meili’s was the saccharine “We’re All In this Together” for which I still mock him mercilessly today (it really is the most Meili song in the world). Of the 9000ish votes counted in 2009 (25%+ of the 13000 NDP registered voter didn’t even bother) Link won 55% of the vote.
Sensing a pattern?
I was at the NDP convention in 2012 as well, in the basement of TCU Place. Unlike 1970’s convention, this orgy was a three-way between Meili, Wotherspoon and Cam Broten. Approximately 8500 votes were cast from a membership of around 11K. Meili had the most votes in the first ballot from which Wotherspoon dropped. Broten won the second ballot by 44 votes, or 50.3% to Meili’s 49.7%.
So let’s dispel with the myth that the Saskatchewan NDP has ever been united, mmkay?
With the exception of Lloyd and Romanow, every Sask NDP leadership race in history has been divisive with split results. The healthiest race was probably the four-way race in 2001 that boiled down to Chris Axworthy and Lorne Calvert, which I’d argue was also the beginning of the end.
The 2018 NDP leadership vote saw 10,837 votes cast out of the 13,414 registered. Meili won with 55% of the vote over Trent Wotherspoon, who finally got the message to stop already, but is now shadowing Carla Beck on her campaign trail.
Which is weird, because I can’t find a single example of a two-time NDP leadership loser being dragged around behind Blakeney, Romanow, Lingenfelter or Broten. No winning leader also has such poor judgment that they’d allow that, because it would demonstrate the political acumen of a day-old chicken nugget.
Yet here we are.
In no world is the above photo credible, authentic or possible not to laugh at. The Sask Party has turned the NDP brand into a joke in the oil patch - and the NDP has done nothing but elect Dwain Lingenfelter to attempt to mitigate that idea. Team Trent shits its pants at the mere suggestion that oil might not need to be the NDP’s top priority and shuts down anything that might attempt to strike a balance.
Oil and gas contributes roughly 8% to Saskatchewan’s annual revenues. That amount is reliant on oil prices, not the Sask Party.
Our potash resource revenue is around the same as oil and gas, but far more reliable, stable and promising, yet we don’t see Sask Party politicians hyperventilating all over it like they do oil.
Oil is not nearly the top job-driving vehicle in our province. It’s GDP growth year-over-year pales in comparison to Saskatchewan’s manufacturing sector.
Reality is the vast majority of our provincial revenue comes from you. You should be the Sask Party AND the NDP’s top priority as an economic driver of our province, not the 8% in southern Saskatchewan.
The oil and climate change issue in Saskatchewan is complex yet manageable. So is countering the Sask Party’s claim that our oil resource somehow their property. The oil industry just dealt with a NDP government in Alberta and are about to do so again - they know how this works and they know the Sask Party is as fleeting a government as any other.
The NDP’s inability to harness one position on climate change and Saskatchewan’s oil patch is unacceptable. Communicating a principled position, grounded in facts and reality, that may not be popular with everyone but reflects strong, well-reasoned policy, is never a losing strategy.
When you’ve given up on ever governing again and the holy grail is leading the Saskatchewan NDP, not becoming premier, it’s all losing strategy.
Today I would be shocked if the NDP has 7000 registered voters for next month’s leadership vote between Kaitlyn Harvey and likely-to-win Carla Beck, who will win solely because the establishment NDP have her back.
Beck will win because she’s more of the same.
The same of what, exactly?
Close your eyes and picture the Saskatchewan NDP.
What is it? What does stand for, besides the opinion of the last person it spoke to?
Getting anything?
If you are, it’s definitely something the Sask Party, not the NDP, has put in your head. The Sask Party has done a masterful job of defining their political rivals, boxing them into the narrative around closed schools and hospitals in rural Saskatchewan. Not once, or not enough, has the NDP responded citing the fact that the Sask Party itself - well, its Mom and Dad, AKA the Devine government - were solely to blame for those closures.
It’s absurd. It’s a total act of revisionist history, as is the notion that rural Saskatchewan has never supported a NDP government. Yet rarely, if at all, has the Sask NDP attempted to correct the record.
As for what the NDP stands for… who knows?! They’re so focused on themselves they can’t even begin to fathom what the rest of us might need.
Were there factions in the Tommy Douglas-led party? Romanow’s NDP?
Of course. Those leaders had their saboteurs too, but they had the courage to lead their way, anyway. Doggedly doing the very thing their critics were desperate to stop them from doing was what made them strong leaders.
Decades ago, a NDP convention passed a stupid resolution. This was not new (the Sask Party’s no stranger to this phenom either), but NDP leader and premier Tommy Douglas was not having it. He marched back on stage and in one speech, had the vote reversed, the resolution rewritten and enthusiastically passed by an overwhelming majority of the same members who had just shot it down.
It’s a damn shame we have allowed both the Sask Party and State Radio, which has mocked Douglas’s appearance, voice and accomplishments from that provincial AM propaganda machine for twenty years, to disparage Douglas the way we have.
Regardless of your political affiliation, you are the one who has been lied to and robbed of pride in your province’s history, not dead Tommy Douglas, who was one of the most skilled and principled politicians our province and country ever had. He wasn’t perfect, but he fiercely loved Saskatchewan and made it a better place. If Douglas thought it was the right thing to do, nothing stopped him.
A good leader doesn’t try to figure out where a howling, restless crowd wants to go. A good leader puts time, energy and consideration, including of other opinions, into the decision, then tells the crowd where they’re going and starts walking.
Don’t like the direction?
Walk the other away.
Find a new leader.
Become one.
If you can’t or won’t do any of that, you don’t get to make everyone else in the group miserable while you drag yourself along with them, deadweight like a toddler. Morale dies. Your constant machinations and moaning doesn’t just negatively impact the leader you don’t like, it holds back the whole group. Soon everyone is miserable. No one wins.
Here’s the bottom line on Carla Beck: if she was a true leader, she wouldn’t even be running for the job right now.
She’d have contributed to holding caucus together and uniting and building her party, instead of leading Team Trent’s charge to run its leader out on a rail so she could get her mitts on the Titanic’s wheel. If Beck was a leader she’d have done her job in the summer and fall of 2021 - building the case for a better, safer K-12 elementary school system during a pandemic - instead of organizing a failed coup.
Like Romanow, Beck could have waited for her time, instead of forcing herself and this leadership race on Saskatchewan. She’d have healed, not harmed. She’d have led by respecting the will of the same NDP membership that democratically elected Ryan Meili, instead of her and her buddies shitting all over it and then expecting that same membership to democratically elect her.
Beck’s judgment during the campaign has been demonstrably a dumpster fire. In addition to dragging around reminders of failed NDP leadership pasts, she dug up some of the worst relics she could find of the party itself to work on her campaign, which tells me they’ll end up in the caucus office in the Legislature.
Carla Beck cannot unite the Saskatchewan NDP, nor draw new light or life into the party - because if she was capable of it, she would have done it already. Instead she chose the opposite and she deserves what’s coming for her - the end of her political career - even if she does steer the Titanic in the interim.
One last thing.
But it’s a doozy: money.
Specifically, the NDP doesn’t have any.
What they do have is being spent in ways that simply don’t add up.
In the five fiscal years from 2017 to 2021, the NDP raised $7.45-mil in revenue. The Sask Party raised $16.15-mil.
The NDP spent $6.26-mil total in those five years. The Sask Party, $11.55-mil.
The advertising spends blow my mind.
In the election year of 2020, the NDP spent $78,000 on advertising. Half of that was online. Zero was spent on radio, print, billboard or broadcast advertising. IN AN ELECTION YEAR.
Overall, the NDP spent $156,000 on advertising between 2017 and 2021. The Sask Party spent $1.36-mil.
You wonder why the public never knew Ryan Meili? There’s your answer: his party refused to promote him.
Here’s a fun one:
the Sask Party spent $3.5-mil on salaries over those five years,
the NDP spent $3.7-mil. $3.2-mil on salaries and $460K on consultants.
In the election year of 2020, the NDP spent $1.1-mil on salaries AND NOTHING ON MAINSTREAM ADVERTISING. 🤯🤯🤯
Sask Party’s salaries were $736,000 in 2020 and they spent $425,000 on advertising.
The Sask NDP spent $460K over five years on consultants. The Sask Party spent $1.6-mil on “research and phoning”.
Guess what? The NDP are in debt. Between 2017 and 2021, NDP spent $259K on interest charges.
The Sask Party, which fundraised a $9-mil surplus in five years, spent a whole $56 (yes, fifty-six dollars) on interest charges. I cannot even imagine what they must have in the bank right now.
The NDP paid hundreds of thousands of dollars on rent and utilities, the Sask Party’s rent expense barely registered. Yet the NDP pays three times as much property tax as the Sask Party?
The Saskatchewan NDP is in debt and hemorrhaging what little cash they have on salaries, consultants, rent and interest payments. The Sask Party appears to have millions in the bank and spends twenty times more on advertising and outreach than the NDP.
I’m sorry, but the Saskatchewan NDP is not coming back from this.
The party has a fraction of the membership it had twenty years ago. It’s cash poor and seemingly in significant debt. What money it does have is being mismanaged. Meili got fed up and fired some of those mismanagers after the 2020 election. Carla Beck rehired them to manage her campaign.
Over the last decade at least, the Saskatchewan NDP has perfected a formula of bad luck, arrogance, stupidity, more arrogance and a healthy dollop of lazy.
Cause when the bar is set at rock bottom, it’s real easy to exceed expectations.
There’s plenty of Dippers out there who suggest highlighting the NDP’s dire circumstances simply makes things worse.
That’s pretty much the Saskatchewan NDP in a nutshell right there.
We learn when we’re children that ignoring a problem does not make it go away and to properly solve a problem, you need to understand it first. The Saskatchewan NDP has ignored the problem, ignored the needs of the general population of the province and blamed everyone but itself for its troubles for the last twenty years.
Self-serving politicians. Meddling, manipulative party activists.
Spending money to pay each other instead of on talking to the people of Saskatchewan.
That is what got the Saskatchewan NDP to where it is, or isn’t, today. Nothing more.
So that’s depressing, right?
I’m not going to pretend I have the definitive solution, or really any solution at all, but in Part 3 of this series we’re going to sift through the ashes of this dumpster fire, looking for options for your vote going forward. Options for the new parties emerging, or threatening to emerge, in Saskatchewan. Options for the fringe parties on the left (including the NDP at this point).
Til then, have a great week.
