On historical patterns

It's certainly understandable to try to maintain hope that a public address will produce some desperately-needed improvements to the lives of Saskatchewan's essential workers.

But let's remember the track record involved here. So far, Scott Moe's changes to working conditions as a result of COVID-19 include limiting the availability of pay in lieu of notice when employees are laid off, and endangering highway safety by eliminating a limit of 13 hours per day for truckers. And the public emergency leave developed in response to the coronavirus is unpaid - meaning that until the federal government introduced its benefits, even workers trying to avoid spreading COVID-19 or meet care obligations could only do so if they could afford to fund it (or had an employer willing to do so).

Meanwhile, the steps eventually taken to rein in the coronavirus have uniformly been unveiled by the province only several days after they've been publicly demanded by Ryan Meili. But Moe has repeatedly refused Meili's consistent calls to allow anybody outside Moe's self-serving inner circle any input into what his government does at this stage.

So the default expectation has to be that workers will see empty words tonight, combined with excuses to further attack their well-being in the fine print to be unveiled tomorrow.