Talk Elections

Fear and trust: How the NDP emerged victorious  
 
REGINA- When Premier Lorne Calvert announced on Oct. 8 that he was calling an election, not many people would have bet his NDP would emerge 28 days later with a majority government, albeit one with a slim 30-28 margin over the Saskatchewan Party.

This spring, the Saskatchewan Party held a 6.5-percentage-point lead over the NDP, according to one media poll. It was drubbing the NDP in the legislature. Mid-campaign polls indicated two-thirds of Saskatchewanians wanted a change in government. So what happened?

The two main factors behind an NDP victory were fear and trust.

"Elections are a lot about trust," Liberal leader David Karwacki told CBC Radio's The Morning Edition on the day after the Nov. 5 election. In his view, people trusted the NDP to take the province forward.

Saskatchewan Party leader Elwin Hermanson told The Morning Edition his party's policies on the Crown corporations opened the door to a "campaign of fear."

People undoubtedly liked and trusted Calvert, a 51-year-old United Church minister who came back from political retirement to capture the NDP leadership three years ago.

When his party screwed up royally, with a cartoon portraying Saskatchewan Party leader Elwin Hermanson as a Nazi prison camp guard loading hapless NDP supporters into a train making it into public, Calvert was immediately contrite. He apologized to Hermanson and fired those responsible.

In comparison, when Ontario Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty was called a "reptilian kitten eater from another planet" in a Progressive Conservative press release during that province's election this fall, then-premier Ernie Eves wouldn't apologize. He is now an ex-premier.

However, the NDP also talked of the Saskatchewan Party's "Alberta Envy" and had ads portraying Hermanson in a sinister way.

Mid-campaign polling indicated Calvert was more popular than Saskatchewan Party leader Elwin Hermanson, who also carried the highest negative rating. In a mid-campaign poll conducted for the CBC, almost half of respondents said Hermanson was the person they least wanted to become premier.

That lack of connection with the voters, especially urban ones, played into the fear factor.

The Saskatchewan Party promised a free-enterprise agenda to grow both Saskatchewan?s economy and population. It would cut taxes, increase spending and make labour laws more business-friendly.

Where the party was ambiguous, however, was on the fate of the Crown corporations, particularly the major utilities: SaskPower, SaskEnergy, SaskTel and SGI, the auto insurance company.

For Regina Leader-Post political columnist Murray Mandryk, a 20-year veteran of covering Saskatchewan politics, the fatal gaffe in the Saskatchewan Party campaign came on day three, when Hermanson refused to definitively say he wouldn?t sell those Crowns.

"No one trusted him after," he wrote in a Nov. 6 column.

When pressed on his party's Crowns policy by The Morning Edition's Sheila Coles – who noted Hermanson said his party had "no plans" to privatize, rather than saying it won't privatize – Hermanson replied that even the NDP has never said it will maintain the Crowns' status quo forever.

During the Oct. 28 leaders debate, Hermanson dropped a mini-bombshell, saying the NDP had a plan to sell off a portion of SaskEnergy, the natural gas utility. Calvert said the deal discussed was about a pipeline, not equity in SaskEnergy. In any event, the issue didn't appear to significantly resonate with the public.

The NDP came into the campaign with major baggage of its own.

One glaring problem was its deficits. The balanced budgets of the Romanow years had disappeared under Calvert. Former finance minister Janice MacKinnon had resigned from Calvert's first cabinet a few weeks after being appointed. Later, she would say it was because she couldn't abide a return to deficits. "Historically, the CCF/NDP … have always been sound managers," she said in an Oct. 29 interview with CBC TV. This election would be the first time it was vulnerable to accusations of being bad fiscal managers, she said.

The NDP would argue its day-to-day spending was balanced and that it had one of the country's best credit ratings. The deficits happened because of extraordinary expenses related to things like drought, forest fires and the mad cow crisis, it said.

In a report released in August, Auditor-General Fred Wendel noted that agricultural support and firefighting costs totaled $595 million in 2003, but the total deficit was $654 million.

Job growth in the province had become anemic. About 25,000 people had left for greener economic pastures elsewhere between 1996 and 2001. The province had the highest number of people under 18 or over 65 in Canada, which translates into the lowest proportion of taxpayers.

The government and the Crown corporations it controlled had made a number of bad investments in recent years, losing tens of millions of dollars. The most symbolic one was Spudco, a failed potato processing plant venture that cost the province $28 million. Perhaps tellingly, Eldon Lautermilch was the cabinet minister who took responsibility for it, but he was easily re-elected Nov. 5 in his Prince Albert Northcote constituency.

Hermanson campaigned on the issue of NDP mismanagement, and tried to use MacKinnon's views to attack the NDP, but obviously he was unable to capitalize on it.

His party's messages did resonate in rural Saskatchewan. In terms of popular vote, his party did capture just over 50 per cent of the popular vote and 24 of 28 seats. The NDP won four seats and 36 per cent of the rural vote.

The most crucial rural turning point was Saskatchewan Rivers, where the NDP defeated a Saskatchewan Party incumbent.

In urban areas, the Saskatchewan Party won only four of 30 seats, with the rest going to the NDP. It captured 29 per cent of the popular vote in cities while the NDP had a 52-per-cent share.

Some long-coveted urban gains were made. The Saskatchewan Party won three seats in Saskatoon; however, Hermanson had wrongly predicted the party would win up to six of 11 seats in the province's largest city.

It also took the rural-urban riding of Melville Saltcoats away from the NDP.

In other urban areas, the party was shut out by the NDP, which swept Regina, Moose Jaw and Prince Albert. It also held Yorkton, returning Clay Serby with a healthy margin. For trivia buffs, it was the first time an agriculture minister was re-elected since 1991.

The collapse of the Liberal vote was one of the major story lines in two different ways.

The NDP maintained power in 1999 by forming a coalition government with the Liberals. Hillson and party leader Jim Melenchuk were made cabinet ministers, and Ron Osika was made speaker of the legislature.

None of those individuals kept their seats. The Saskatchewan Party defeated Melenchuk in Saskatoon Northwest and Osika in Melville-Saltcoats. The NDP took The Battlefords from Hillson.

Karwacki said he didn't think the coalition wasa big issue, noting it didn't seem to hurt the NDP.

In addition, the Liberal overall popular vote went from 20 per cent to 14.5 per cent. In contrast, the NDP went up from 38.7 to 44.6 per cent, making it the apparent beneficiary of the Liberal drop. The Saskatchewan Party drooped slightly, going from 39.6 to 39.3 per cent.

Voter turnout was up in this election. It was 70 per cent, compared to 62 per cent in 1999. This When he became Liberal leader in 2001, Karwacki was seen by many as a strong addition to the Saskatchewan political scene. However, he wasn't able to win his Saskatoon Meewasin seat.

While he tried to offer a positive alternative to the NDP and Saskatchewan Party, some commentators opined that he spread himself too thin over the campaign.

In comparison, the NDP identified 18 Saskatchewan Party constituencies as strongholds and put almost no real effort into those, concentrating the provincial campaign's resources on constituencies where they had a chance to win.

Karwacki said they did concentrate on 10 to 12 constituencies they identified as winnable, but ultimately, his party fell victim to the ideologically polarized nature of this campaign.

Both Karwacki and Hermanson said they would leave their political fates up to their parties.

Even on election night, people were already speculating Hermanson, the party's only leader to date, would be at risk of being turfed because of this loss.

For the NDP, the easy part may be over.

It is the governing party of a province with a precarious fiscal position, with an economy that's easily buffeted by forces beyond any government's control. Its work force is aging and poorly educated, and it's right next door to an economic supernova called Alberta.

The party didn't show many bold new ideas during the campaign, and it hasn't substantially changed its team, which could make one wonder who will be the source of new ideas.

With its thin minority, the NDP will have to stay on their toes in the legislature. If they're outnumbered on a vote of confidence, the government could fall. Saskatchewan Party officials were hinting election night that voters could be back at the polls sooner than they think.

By leading his party to a fourth mandate, Calvert has ventured into territory not occupied since Tommy Douglas's heyday.

If he wants to equal Douglas's record of five straight mandates, he'll need a combination of good government and good luck.