On incomplete care

Shorter Dustin Duncan:

I'm pretty sure a health care system can't do more than two things at a time. And for the ministry I'm overseeing, surgery is no longer one of them.

On unwanted obligations

Mike McKinnon reports that austerity elsewhere isn't being applied to continued seven-figure spending on a Lean tour. But it's particularly worth noting how that particular money pit is
still drawing Saskatchewan citizens' money even as the provincial government cries poor at every other opportunity:

The Saskatchewan government’s freeze on non-essential travel does not include costly trips to the United States for staff to be trained in Lean methods.

Seven of the so-called “Lean tours” were planned between Jan. 1 and Mar. 31, at a cost of $8,900 per person, per trip. With 20 people on each tour, the total cost is nearly $1.25 million.
...
In light of the travel freeze, Duncan said the Lean tours would have been reconsidered if the government had not been contractually obligated to them.

In other words, if the Wall government hadn't previously entered into a contract requiring it to pay off a private operator, it would likely have determined that the tours were a waste of money. But because it had contractually committed to waste that money, the provincial government was in no position to actually consider whether the spending was worth it in a changed fiscal situation.

Of course, that raises the question as to why the Sask Party was so reckless as to tie its own hands in the first place.

Lean may be one of the more familiar areas where public decision-making is being sacrificed to a desire to lock in corporate gains. But there are other areas - most notably P3 infrastructure projects - where the choice to sign long-term contracts today figures to severely restrict what decisions can be made in the public interest later. (Just wait until, say, a school which should be kept open based on any reasonable public interest calculation ends up getting closed because we're stuck funneling money to the private operator of another one which would be closed on the merits.)

In sum, Duncan's explanation only raises more questions as to why the Wall government has signed away any ability to make the best possible decisions for Saskatchewan. And if we're already paying the price for the Sask Party's past ill-advised contracts, then we need to make sure they're not in a position to inflict new ones on the province.

The definition of insanity

For those concerned that the Wall government wouldn't do anything at all about environmental damage caused by Alberta's tar sands, there is indeed a plan: to rely on Alberta's largesse to determine whether anything actually gets cleaned up.

Because surely the same strategy which has failed miserably in dealing with a federal government which has 13 seats to lose in the province is bound to work much better when the other party doesn't even face a theoretical political risk if it simply strings us along.

A friendly reminder

The Sask Party seems to be hoping that if they keep making announcements about SCN being sold, nobody will notice the fact that there's still a serious risk of the network dying due to the Wall government's neglect. But with all parties still recognizing that the CRTC still hasn't approved the purchase (including a shift from a solely education format to one supported by paid advertising), let's keep in mind what happened when Bluepoint Investment Corp. planned to buy a Brandon station just last year:

(Bluepoint's) last plan to buy a Western Canadian broadcaster...fell through when the CRTC wouldn't agree to rig a future application in its favour, leading to the permanent closure of a broadcasting institution.

Who else is filled with optimism about SCN's future?

Not looking promising

So it turns out that the Sask Party's hand-picked purchaser for SCN is a company whose last plan to buy a Western Canadian broadcaster...fell through when the CRTC wouldn't agree to rig a future application in its favour, leading to the permanent closure of a broadcasting institution.

Who else is filled with optimism about SCN's future?

Update: Particularly since Bluepoint's interest in SCN is likewise based on a planned change (in this case to add advertising to an educational channel) which requires CRTC approval?

Finding labour's voice

In case there was any doubt that the Sask Party is only interested in listening to corporate voices, it should be put to rest by the fact that the Wall government won't even consider the idea of maintaining SCN for its value to the province, but will keep the lights on at public expense only when told to do so by possible bidders.

But there's a highly intriguing possibility among the groups interested in taking over:

The Saskatchewan Federation of Labour also expressed interest Friday in bringing together various groups that could take over the station.

Of course, the Wall government would burn SCN to the ground and salt the land it's built on before allowing the SFL to get its hands on a media outlet. But it would be entirely fitting if the Sask Party's ideological distaste for public services ended up facilitating the creation of a network to counterbalance the province's corporate media. And while the Sask Party may be able to gum up the works when it comes to SCN in particular, hopefully the SFL's efforts will lead to far better media balance developing over time.

Just so we're clear...

...in trying to paper over its negligence in attacking Saskatchewan's film industry, the Sask Party is now not only scrambling to invent new programs to compensate, but announcing project-level funding out of a pool of money which didn't exist until this afternoon's press release.

I for one see absolutely no way in which that attitude toward public money could go horribly, horribly wrong.

A slipping mask

So far in the Saskatchewan election campaign, it's been clear that the Sask Party has taken up the federal Cons' strategy of muzzling its candidates to avoid any unwanted honesty. But even with that already-problematic plan in place, the Sask Party's candidates still haven't been able to avoid some hints at reopening an issue which Wall and company have desperately tried to defuse.

Remember that this summer, Wall surprisingly took a public stand against the TILMA. While he claimed (without any apparent basis in reality) that a less toxic agreement could have been reached if Saskatchewan had been a part of the negotiations, he said in no uncertain terms that he "would not sign on" to the deal as it stands.

During the campaign, however, a couple of Wall's candidates have been suggesting a rather different view.

The most obvious public statement was that of Moose Jaw North candidate Warren Michelson, who said that he doesn't think his party would "say absolutely no to TILMA". But perhaps more significant based on his relative stature is the shift in position from Weyburn-Big Muddy MLA Dustin Duncan, who seems to have edited out any problems with TILMA itself in order to focus solely on the view that Saskatchewan should have joined Klein and Campbell behind closed doors:

In regard to the labour shortage, (Duncan) noted the shortage is being felt all across western Canada, and not too long ago the B.C. and Alberta governments met to discuss ways of dealing with the labour shortage, but Saskatchewan's government wasn't there.

Naturally, Duncan seems to have avoided referring to the TILMA by name. But it seems equally clear that he perceives the TILMA as a "way of dealing with the labour shortage", and figures that the NDP's choice not to participate in the original closed-door negotiations was a mistake which his party would change.

Now, it isn't certain whether Michelson and Duncan fully represent their party's view when it comes to the TILMA. And unfortunately, by suppressing the issue this long, Wall has likely succeeded in preventing a full public debate about the TILMA (and his party's actual stance on it) during the campaign.

But at the very least, it's obvious that there's some strong appetite within the party to reverse one of the party's efforts to become more palatable to Saskatchewan voters. And the more clear it becomes that the image the Sask Party has tried to portray during the campaign isn't what voters can expect once the election is over, the more likely voters are to have second thoughts about taking the Sask Party at its word.