As if the past 17 years of Sask Party wasn't enough, we now get another 4.
I know most folks aren't watching Canadian politics right now because of the absolute clusterfuck that is about to go down in the US, but it's been exhausting dealing with our local provincial government lately.
The Sask Party is a right-wing conservative party and has made a big show in the last decade or so of "standing up to" our Liberal Federal government. Some of it was reasonable and, dare I say, even good to do. Some of it was idiotic fishing for spotlight and news-worthy clips.
So, federally, they've taken on some big issues that, honestly, needed to be taken on. Carbon Tax and how it's handled is a big one and Sask Party has been adamantly against it from the drop, as one example.
On the other hand, they've also spent their entire time in power doing back-to-back cuts to education and healthcare. Which is a neat trick because then they get to point at the health system in Saskatchewan and go "look how bad it's doing, we need to privatize healthcare!" as if it wasn't a monster entirely of their own making. But, people's memories are short and the Sask Party leverages that by making the NDP's prior closure of hospitals in some rural centers the boogeyman in the closet. "Remember that 24 years ago they closed hospitals!" they say, rattling chains and making spooky ghost sounds.
Nevermind that most of those hospitals were open 24/7 and just pissing money away that could have been used within the rest of the healthcare ecosystem. Either way, it's a fun little not-entirely-lie that the Sask Party gets to bring out each and every election cycle and swing around above our heads like the Sword of Damocles. Nevermind that it was only the acute care sections of these hospitals that closed. Nevermind that in 17 years in power, the Sask Party hasn't re-opened a single one of those acute care centers. They still get to pick out the "they closed hospitals!" line and toss it around and folks still buy into it because it takes five minutes to google facts like "are those 52 hospitals still open?" which, yes, they are... just not 24/7 sitting empty.
As for education, we went from being the highest-spending Province in the country less than a decade ago, to being second from last on a per-student basis.
Now, I'm not saying an NDP government would fix this all in 4 years - I don't think that's possible... but I am quite sure that we're going to see further cuts to core services under four more years of Sask Party leadership... and that's frustrating. I've dealt with our healthcare system first-hand, and it's a goddamn nightmare. I've got kids in school and I see how much we need the extra funding. Even our roads and infrastructure are so bad it's becoming a running joke across the country. But at least we're not as bad as Quebec. Yet.
All of this is to say, I'm frustrated. I don't like our current governments, in general, because I think most of these career politicians are useless and they're entirely out-of-touch with the folks they pretend to represent. As such, I think any time we let these clowns stay in power for more than 8 years we're screwing ourselves over. If I had my way, we'd flop a new government every 4-8 years max, and by virtue of no single moron being in power for more than a decade, we might be able to actually stop them from making things worse.
A guy can dream, eh?