New Brunswick, BC Voted for Change. How Will That Bode for Saskatchewan’s Election?

The New Brunswick election saw the governing Conservatives trading places with the Liberal Opposition. In B.C., the governing NDP may have lost its majority government and it’s still unknown who will form the next government.
It remains to be seen what will happen in Saskatchewan’s Oct. 28 election.
Incumbent New Brunswick Premier and PC Leader Blaine Higgs led a low-key campaign and lost his own seat in the Oct. 21 election. The election campaign also saw a clear divide between English and French voters, as francophones threw their support behind Holt’s Liberals.
Royal Roads University associate professor David Black told The Epoch Times that in the case of B.C., the provincial Conservatives were buoyed by the popularity of the national Conservative brand.
“They have been elevated very clearly by what’s happening federally,” he said in an interview.
In Saskatchewan, where the incumbent Saskatchewan Party has been in power since 2007, leader Scott Moe has focused on building a reputation of standing up to Ottawa, including when his government stopped collecting carbon taxes on home heating last January. The two-term premier is vying for a third term after being sworn in six years ago.
Simon Fraser University senior lecturer Sanjay Jeram says voters sometimes look at what’s happening around them and simply want change, spelling trouble for the incumbent.
“I don’t think people really know what the solution to their problems is,“ he said in an interview. ”They just want something different when they feel frustrated, which usually happens after a period of time when there’s one government and there are always problems. The perception of reality is never that ‘things are great.’”
But fatigue with the status quo is just one of the elements in the Saskatchewan election, with a number of other issues at play, including proposed policies on key issues, party record, as well as how federal politics may influence the fortunes of provincial parties.
The scholars are trying not to read a lot into those figures, saying that much of the change in voting behaviour comes down to convenience.
“I think it’s just people adapting to the fact that traffic is heavy and their weekends are busy, and advanced voting just makes good sense,” Jeram said.
Jeram predicts “a reasonably stable agreement” between the NDP and Greens, with the NDP “very constrained” in its agenda “because of that Green influence.”
If so, the path ahead in the short term will be “not a lot of change, more or less the same,” he says.
On the other hand, he says, “the reality of the landscape is that if those two [recount] seats turn and the Conservatives get a majority, … we’re in for an interesting ride because we have a party that almost didn’t exist [that] is going to form a majority government.”