The purge continues

There's been some reporting about the Wall government's "rebalancing" in the Saskatchewan civil service to move union positions out of scope - ensuring that the public pays more for the same work as the price of undercutting public-sector unions. But that's apparently the least of the Sask Party's efforts to manipulate the civil service for its political ends.

Here's a Facebook post from Yens Pedersen (and need I add, former leadership candidate and NDP nominee in Regina South?):

Civil servants beware - a few civil servants and their spouses I know have received unsolicited calls at their home to find out what they think of the Sask Party and premier Brad Wall. Some callers apparently sound like a pollster, but are not. These are Sask Party calls, and they are building their database of who is and isn't a Sask Party supporter in the government.
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(F)irst one I heard, thought it was a coincidence. 5th one I heard, seems like a pattern. The questions all sound similar too, not typical pollster questions.

(Incidentally, a few more examples have apparently surfaced since Yens' original posts.)

Elsewhere on the same thread, Yens also rightly notes that the names of civil servants are available through the Government of Saskatchewan's public directory. So it's not particularly difficult for anybody with enough resources to call up virtually any public servant at home by matching work names with listed phone numbers.

But it would appear to be a first for the Sask Party to be using that method to carry out a systematic loyalty test. And based on the Wall government's track record of politically-motivated firings, there's plenty of reason for public servants to be concerned about a government that seems entirely eager to purge any independent thought from the province's civil service.

Update: A couple of commenters note that the scope of the calling seems to go beyond the civil service alone, raising the possibility that it's instead a garden-variety push poll. Which would itself make for another broken promise for the Sask Party - but makes it less clear whether the calls are related to the management of provincial employees.