REGINA - Today, I’m going to take a final look at the path to 31 seats for the two major parties competing in the 2024 Saskatchewan election.
To recap, the path to 31 was a simple task for the Saskatchewan Party. All they needed to do was hold 28 seats in their “rural firewall” and then add just three more anywhere else, and they’d win the election.
For the NDP, it was a much narrower and more complicated path — mainly due to the fact that there was this firewall of 28 Saskatchewan Party seats they had to contend with. So they had to go around these seats.
Their path, as I said in last week’s article prior to the election, was to hold the 14 seats they already had in the Legislature, to take back Athabasca, to take eight “battleground” seats in Regina, Saskatoon, Moose Jaw and Prince Albert that were close in the 2020 election; and then blow up the “urban firewall” of nine urban hard-to-win Sask Party ridings. If they won eight of those nine, they’d win their majority.
So what happened?
The NDP needed to hold their 14 seats. They did that, by margins far greater than what they won in the last election.
The NDP needed to win back Athabasca. They did that, too. Leroy Laliberte buried the Sask Party incumbent Jim Lemaigre.
Then the NDP needed to win those eight battleground seats in urban Saskatchewan. That’s where they ran into trouble.
Included in those eight battleground seats were two ridings in Prince Albert — Carlton and Northcote — and Moose Jaw Wakamow. Wakamow had a sitting incumbent who was not running again and under fire because of criminal charges. Everyone expected the NDP to win it; they did not. Carlton had no incumbent with Joe Hargrave leaving and everyone thought it would be ripe for the taking, too. The NDP did not.
Nobody expected Alana Ross to win Northcote again; the challenger was a former NDP MLA in Nicole Rancourt, and the Sask Party won by one of the narrowest margins in the whole province in 2020.
Ross was a goner. Except, she wasn’t. By just over a hundred votes, Ross hung on.
The NDP also came close to dropping a fourth battleground in Saskatoon Westview, too — it took a count of the mail in votes for the NDP to apparently take the seat, Still, dropping three was bad enough.
It meant the NDP needed to run the table in all nine of the hard-to-win “Sask Party urban firewall” seats, and then figure out how to win two other seats outside the four major centres just to make it to 31.
Even if they toppled cabinet ministers left and right, which they did, it was still going to be a tall order because of how massive Ken Cheveldayoff’s majority was in Saskatoon last time. It looks now as if Cheveldayoff will barely survive, with a current margin of just under two hundred votes.
But worst of all for the NDP, Moose Jaw struck again. The NDP failed to take the "firewall" seat of Moose Jaw North. Tim McLeod held on, with a margin around 1,600.
So by now the NDP had been swept in Moose Jaw and swept in Prince Albert. What's more, the Sask Party also booted out Sask United in the rural ridings right next door to them, places the NDP might have hoped to come up the middle in vote splits.
And that was the ballgame, because if the NDP couldn’t win any of those places, there was no way they were cracking any portion of the Sask Party “rural firewall” of 28 safe bedrock seats. What was worse, by this point the NDP needed to win not one, not two, but four of these seats. It wasn't happening, folks. The NDP didn't even come close - not even in The Battlefords, where they thought they had a hope against Jeremy Cockrill.
As agonizing and as bloody a path as it turned out to be for them, with several cabinet casualties, Scott Moe and the Saskatchewan Party got their four more years in government. For the NDP it’s going to be four frustrating years on the opposition benches, again.
There’s an awful lot of talk now about an urban-rural split and how poorly the Sask Party did in the cities. But the fact is they didn’t do poorly in all of them. The cities of Moose Jaw and Prince Albert absolutely saved Scott Moe’s hide.
In the end, I can’t say I’m surprised, because it was clear something was up. I wasn’t the only one who noticed how much time Moe was spending in both Moose Jaw and Prince Albert this whole campaign. He was in both cities multiple times hosting rallies and major press conferences, including in the final week when Moe was in Prince Albert two days in a row.
Moe was in these places so often that reporters in Regina were questioning why Moe wasn’t in Regina more. Perhaps it’s because in order to get to 31 seats, maybe you have to also campaign elsewhere in the province?
It’s also not as if the NDP ignored these places, either. Carla Beck and the NDP also spent endless hours in Prince Albert and Moose Jaw, trying to flip the seats. They were in Moose Jaw countless times calling for a new school and upset about the hyperbaric chamber not being open.
These cities were election battlegrounds in every sense of the word. The two parties both knew how important these ridings were and threw all their resources at it, leaving no stone unturned. The NDP’s eventual defeat cannot be blamed on a lack of effort on their part.
I have a few theories on why Moose Jaw and Prince Albert didn’t flip the way Saskatoon or Regina did. Maybe it’s because in an election where rural areas went heavily Sask Party, while urban areas went heavily NDP, these two cities actually represented a sort of electoral middle ground. While the NDP blew out the big cities Saskatoon and Regina, and while the Sask Party were blowing out in the rurals, the Sask Party did win Moose Jaw and PA - but it was close and competitive.
They were urban areas that maybe weren’t really so urban in their outlook. Issues in agriculture and mining and the forestry industry all were factors.
At the end of the day, issues matter. I’ll tell you one issue that did nothing for the NDP in Moose Jaw: their outrage over local Saskatoon firm Shercom losing the tire recycling contract to that horrible company from California.
That NDP message probably played very well in Saskatoon where people were very mad about this, likely costing the Sask Party several close races. All their attacks on Environment Minister Christine Tell on the issue likely took her down in Regina, too.
But they weren’t mad everywhere.
It turns out 'that horrible California company' did its tire recycling business in Moose Jaw. The folks living there probably thought these were good guys.
For the NDP it is a classic case of ‘you can’t convince everyone.’
Meanwhile, the NDP had a relentless “sky is falling in health care” message day in and day out on the campaign trail, a pitch which played well in Saskatoon and Regina where people noticed the pressures on the system.
But that effort was blunted somewhat in Prince Albert, because the Sask Party came through with redeveloping Victoria Hospital. People remembered Moe and the Sask Party delivered for Prince Albert in their hour of need.
Here’s something else: you know the heavily-criticized Marshal’s service that the NDP ridiculed to no end?
Well, that very same Marshal’s service and their 70 officers was to be based in Prince Albert. Crime-ridden Prince Albert, where public safety is a huge issue with voters, actually stood to benefit from the Marshal’s service being based there.
Now you can see some of why Prince Albert voted the way it did. Besides, Scott Moe from nearby Shellbrook is practically a local. The pundits should have seen this coming.
At the end of the day, it simply wasn’t in the cards for the NDP to get to 31 seats. They had a huge mountain to climb and a massive amount of seats they needed to pick up, and a lot of things had to go their way.
But because of all the gains they made this time, up to 27 seats, the NDP’s “path to 31” is not only a lot easier but a lot clearer for 2028.
That path leads directly through the four ridings of Moose Jaw and Prince Albert — the cities that saved Scott Moe in 2024.
