Populist opinion

Today, the Globe and Mail has caught on to the fact that Brad Wall's nuclear cheerleading doesn't speak for large swaths of Saskatchewan. And one of the strongest voices on the anti-nuclear side points out that it isn't just the province that might end up paying a price if Wall keeps trying to pretend that public opinion doesn't matter:

"I haven't seen more grassroots involvement on an issue since the great debates over Medicare," said Jim Harding, a retired university professor and the author of Canada's Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan and the Global Nuclear System . "At the meetings I've attended, people are generally 70 to 80 per cent opposed to any kind of nuclear development. It's quite astonishing."

Some 450 people reportedly attended one recent meeting in Paradise Hill, population 500.

"Populism can swing from right to left very quickly in this province," said Dr. Harding.

"We have an election in two years and if this government tries to ram this through, people won't forget it when they go to the polls."

And as an added bonus, the anti-nuclear side includes one prominent figure would seem to have been a party-mate of Wall's:

"What's the purpose of having public hearings when the Premier himself is declaring his plans before the hearings are complete," said prominent political activist David Orchard, who spoke at a hearing last month. "The people of Saskatchewan are being steamrolled right now by a government that doesn't seem prepared to listen to the hearings that it itself set up."

Longtime leaders of this blog will know that I've wondered for quite some time why the federal NDP hasn't made more of a push to tap into populist sentiment - particularly now that the remains of Reform have been absorbed into as cynical a patronage machine as the country has seen. But it could be that what's been lacking wasn't so much a party effort as a single issue significant enough to prod people into action.

Now, all indications are that Brad Wall has handed the Saskatchewan NDP exactly that. And while it's worth wondering whether there's anything Wall can do to put the genie back in the bottle, one has to figure that pushing ahead with an isotope reactor without consultation may seal Wall's fate if the NDP can harness the anti-nuclear movement in 2011.