Thread by @steve_boots

The Sask Party is broken. They aren’t even pretending to be functional at this point. They seek only to concentrate the power and wealth in this province into fewer and fewer hands. How did they come to be so broken? I have a theory, and it has to do with Greek Myth. A thread…

The seeds of the development of the Sask Party came in the 1995 election. The PCs, under Bill Boyd, got crushed, taking 5 seats. The Liberals, under Linda Haverstock, took 9. The NDP looked unbeatable. The Liberals and PCs recognized this, and decided to join forces.

The original Sask Party started with 4 PCs and 4 liberals, Not long after, in 1998, they voted Elwin Hermanson their first leader. EH struggled to win elections. He made gains in 1999, taking 25 seats, but lost in 2003 by saying he’d listen to offers to sell Crown Corps.

Then, young up-and-comer Brad Wall came roaring into party leadership after the loss of the 2003 election. And Wall was, by today’s standards, pretty moderate. So how did they wind up becoming so extreme in later years?

This brings us to our mythological connection. It’s a classic logic puzzle created by Thomas Hobbes called the Ship of Theseus. Theseus, over the course of his adventures, has to repair his ship. He replaced planks when they rot, nails when they rust, sails when they tear.

Eventually he replaces every piece of the ship. The question the myth asks is, “Is it the same ship as when he left on his journey?” And the same question could be asked of the Sask Party. Did you notice how much they’ve shifted ideologically in the last five years?

It’s not a coincidence that the last of the original Liberal party members retired in 2016. June Draud, Ken Kravetz, Rob Gantefoer, and Bob Bjonerud all either retired or didn’t run for re-election in 2016.

Basically all remaining moderate influence was slowly replaced by right-wing ideologues. The ideas within the party grew homogeneous. And the question that Sask Party supporters need to ask themselves is, “Is this the same party as it was when they started?”

I would argue that the Sask Party of 2007 and the Sask Party of today bear only a passing resemblance to one another. The Liberal influences have left the party behind, creating a void that hardline conservatives have filled.

The same sort of thing happened with the Flat Earth Movement, of all things. The modern, internet-based iteration started as a joke, but eventually all of the jokesters walked away, leaving only the fringe radicals who unironically believed the theory.

livescience.com/24310-flat-ear…

Groups evolve and change. Their values can evolve and change, as the Sask Party’s have. I can only hope that their more moderate supporters come to see how their own party has left them behind.

Sources: Several, but every source I used was directly linked from the Wikipedia entry on the SP.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatche…

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