On set identities

While there's been some attention paid to Environics' polling on provincial identity politics, little of it seems to have noted just how little public interest there is in a highly concerted effort to build up a Saskatchewan sovereigntist movement. 

After all, Scott Moe's Saskatchewan Party has gone far out of its way (backed of course by big Alberta oil money) to spend time demanding more power as a "nation within a nation", rather than using the authority it has to keep Saskatchewan's people safe and healthy. And much of its excuse for doing so is the presence of other theoretical competitors for the anti-Canadian title - from the Buffalo Party which parlayed the province's largest out-of-province donation into a few distant second-place finishes, to whatever is currently bubbling up in the fever swamps of anti-vaxxers.

Yet for all the money, power and fanaticism behind those efforts, Environics' polling shows only 24% wanting more to be done to build a provincial identity separate from Canada...compared to 20% taking the position that we should change course to stop wasting our time. (And of course the largest single share is of those who choose the middle, "same" option rather than wanting to increase the resources being put into stoking separatism for amusement and profit.)

Of course, it's far from clear that Moe or any of his fellow travelers have the slightest clue what a Saskatchewan identity would look like other than to be a fully-owned subsidiary of the Alberta conservative movement. But we should be both reassured by the fact that our fellow citizens aren't taking the bait no matter how much of a noise machine is dedicated to pitching it - and outraged that our government is so bent on a cause which is so obviously out of touch with what's important to the province's actual people.