REGINA — The agriculture community wasn’t surprised by the outcome of Monday night’s provincial election but noticed a clear rural-urban divide among the constituencies claimed by the Saskatchewan Party and the NDP.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the Saskatchewan Party has 35 out of a possible 61 seats with the majority in rural constituencies and the rest from Moose Jaw, Prince Albert and Yorkton. The NDP got 26 seats by taking all of the Regina ridings, all but two ridings in Saskatoon, and the northern ridings of Athabasca and Cumberland. The mail-in ballots need to be counted and the results likely won’t be official until early November.
Kevin Hursh, the chief agricultural editor of SaskAgToday.com, noted the contrast will create challenges for both parties.
“The NDP, if it's ever going to form government, has to figure out how to make inroads in rural Saskatchewan where it really ran far behind the winning candidate in most cases. For the Sask Party, they have to figure out how to re-establish credibility in the big cities and earn some of those constituencies back if they want to be a credible government going forward.”
About 53 per cent of registered voters in the province cast a ballot, according to results on the Elections Saskatchewan website. Hursh said voter turnout would be higher based on numbers for Voting Week but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
“A big voter turnout typically means a lot of people voting for change … there must have been a lot of people that just didn’t know how they wanted to vote or weren’t motivated to vote, so that’s not usually a situation where the opposition party makes big gains if there wasn’t a huge wave of people wanting change.”
Hursh went on to say “It’s going to be a very different looking legislature” with a larger Opposition party in the NDP, a governing Sask Party that has seen its numbers come down “and know that the writing is on the wall for them to make sure that they appeal to voters better than they have in this election campaign.”
He also says the gains the NDP made will result in the agriculture groups taking them “much more seriously as a potential government in waiting,”
“And when they go to lobby to government … or raise concerns, that they may not just be visiting with Saskatchewan’s ninister of agriculture, they may also seek out the NDP agriculture critic, and the NDP would do well to be much more visible on agricultural policy than they have been in the past,” Hursh added.
Groups say they have good working relationship with both parties
The Saskatchewan Cattlemen’s Association (SCA), Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan (APAS) and the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) say they have positive working relationships with both major parties and that won’t change anytime soon.
“At the end of the day, APAS will continue to lobby for what the producers of our province require and what they need and what’s good policy for them, and we’ll continue to lobby both the Opposition and the government to ensure that happens,” said Ian Boxall, president of APAS.
“I don’t think anything changes on our front – the government … they do have a majority so I don’t know if a whole bunch changes … but I do hope they got the message that there is this divide and hope there’s a way that this can all be bridged and that moving forward things are of a Saskatchewan-fronted approach, not an urban or rural approach.”
“We don’t know who the premier is going to pick for cabinet ministers yet, but once that is announced we’ll be looking forward to meeting with ministers of Health, Agriculture, Policing and possibly Highways to address some of the infrastructure needs,” said Bill Huber, acting president of SARM.
“We’re also going to be talking to the Opposition, to NDP leader Carla Beck and her colleagues in the NDP caucus and sometimes with good government, you need good opposition. They’ve gained a few more seats this time, so they’ll be a little stronger voice on the other side of the house, but we’re looking forward to working with the government and the opposition.”
“From our perspective, we’re pleased to see the Saskatchewan Party remains in power – it’s good to have a consistent government that we can work on common issues with,” said Grant McLellan, CEO of the SCA.
“That has worked well with us in the past, but I mean certainly the surge in NDP support is not something that surprises us and we have a very good working relationship with the NDP as well, we definitely try to maintain relationships with all the major political parties …”
Priorities for each group when members of each party return to the legislature vary, from supports for young farmers, to rural health care, infrastructure, policing and the Lake Diefenbaker irrigation expansion project.
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