You likely didn’t need Brad Wall’s help when figuring out how you should vote.
And while the Saskatchewan premier couldn’t seem to help himself when it came to overstepping his bounds and telling you how to vote, even he somewhat acknowledged that the help might not have been all that helpful.
“That’s the beauty of a free, secret ballot,” Wall told reporters in Regina last week.
You voted on the issues you saw as most important – not necessarily the issues the premier saw as most important.
So that means that Wall’s assessment on which major party best addressed the most important economic – at least, as defined by Brad Wall – was an unhelpful, useless and partisan exercise that told us nothing?
Well, it was a partisan exercise designed to benefit his Conservative friend Stephen Harper. But whether it was necessarily a useless one told us nothing other that it might be in the eyes of the beholder.
For those of you that didn’t hear – or perhaps chose to ignore because you didn’t need Wall’s “help” in casting your own ballot – what Wall did is write to each of the three major federal leaders and asked them about their positions on the three issues he deemed most critical.
Those issues were pipeline development, labelling genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and changing the equalization formula to include revenue from renewable resources.
To the shock of no one, Wall determined early last week that Harper’s Conservatives were the best choice and that Tom Mulcair’s NDP “did not align with the people of Saskatchewan.”
Again, it was all a rather silly exercise in which Wall clearly chose issues that put the Conservatives in the best light.
Of course, the Conservatives would have the most favourable position on the Keystone XL, Northern Gateway or Energy East pipelines. It is the only party that wholeheartedly endorses all three.
Similarly, the Conservatives would obviously have had the best position on opposing GMO labeling.
Moreover, all parties looked equally bad on equalization because no party was going to say that revenue from renewable resources should be excluded, for fear of offending Quebec voters that get the most benefit from equalization and have the most hydroelectric power.
Interestingly, Wall conveniently ignored Harper’s 2006 promise to remove non-renewable resources from the equalization formula.
It was an irresponsible thing for Harper to promise because it would have meant a “have” province like Saskatchewan would have received an extra $800 million a year. However, it also meant we didn’t receive from Ottawa in the past decade nearly $8 billion that we were promised.
Alberta would have been subsidized four or five times that amount. This means that what Harper promised in 2006, he didn’t deliver. This was billions of dollars more than what Liberal leader Justin Trudeau promised.
But all this said, there was some validity in Wall’s partisan exercise.
There is a reason why Saskatchewan has been governed, provincially, by the CCF/NDP for 38 of the last 62 years, yet only twice in that six-decade period (in 1953 and in 1988) has sent a majority of CCF or NDP MPs to Ottawa.
It has to do with the big difference between what people expect from their provincial leadership versus what’s expected from federal MPs.
It is here where Wall’s “helpfulness” may begin.
As obviously partisan as Wall’s assessment may have been, it might have helped focus on some issues most critical to this province in Ottawa.
After all, is having pipelines providing more alternatives when it comes to selling our oil a bad thing? Or is eliminating things hampering the sale of our agriculture products bad?
Full clarity for your vote? Maybe not.
But it might have offered a little more focus as to what your federal vote should have been based on.
