Jump to content

Saskatchewan New Democratic Party

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 70.73.4.197 (talk) at 15:36, 29 March 2007 (rv -- do not remove sourced/referenced information.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Template:Infobox Canada Political Party

The Saskatchewan New Democratic Party (NDP) (formerly the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF)) is a social democratic political party in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. It currently forms the government of Saskatchewan and has been a dominant force in Saskatchewan politics since the 1940s.

Origins

The party's origins lie in the Farmer-Labour Group, a political organization created by the United Farmers of Canada (Saskatchewan Section) led by George Williams, and the Independent Labour Party led by M.J. Coldwell in 1932. The FLG won 24% of the vote, but only five seats in the 1934 provincial election, which saw a Conservative-Progressive-Independent coalition government replaced by the provincial Liberals. Following the election, the Farmer-Labour Group officially became the Saskatchewan branch of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), although it had been known unofficially as the CCF's Saskatchewan wing before that. The national CCF party had been founded in 1933.

In government

In the 1944 election, the Saskatchewan CCF, led by premier Tommy Douglas, swept to power, forming the first socialist government in North America. The CCF/NDP has governed the province with only two interruptions (1964-71 and 1982-91) since 1944.

Arguably, the party's greatest accomplishment was the introduction of North America's first comprehensive system of public medical insurance or Medicare (sometimes referred to as socialized medicine). The fight to introduce Medicare in the province was intense, due to the opposition of the province's doctors, backed by the American Medical Association. The AMA feared that public health care would spread to other parts of the continent if introduced in one part. The doctors staged a 23-day strike. But despite a concerted attempt to defeat Medicare, the program was introduced and became so popular it was soon adopted across Canada.

After doing much of the preliminary work on Medicare, Douglas resigned as party leader and Premier in 1961 to become the founding leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada. The NDP had been formed by a coalition of the CCF and the Canadian Labour Congress. The Saskatchewan CCF followed suit, and adopted its current name in 1967 after a transitional period when the party was awkwardly named the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, Saskatchewan Section of the New Democratic Party of Canada.

The turmoil of the Medicare fight took its toll, however, and the NDP-CCF government of Douglas's successor Woodrow S. Lloyd was defeated by Ross Thatcher's Saskatchewan Liberal Party in the 1964 election. The party dropped the "CCF" name after the 1967 election.

Recent history

The NDP rebuilt itself and went through a painful confrontation between a left-wing movement dubbed "The Waffle" (a name derived from Toronto leftist economist James Laxer's quip that if he was perceived to be "waffling" on a policy question, then he'd "rather waffle to the left than waffle to the right") and the more conservative party establishment. The party returned to power in the 1971 election, under Allan Blakeney, embarking on a programme of nationalizing the province's natural resources. This saw the creation of parastatel or Crown corporations that drilled for oil (Saskatchewan Oil and Gas Corp. or SaskOil), mined potash (the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan) and sought hard-rock minerals (the Saskatchewan Mining Development Corp.). Blakeney's government was defeated in the 1982 election by the Progressive Conservative Party of Saskatchewan, led by Grant Devine.

The party returned to office in 1991, and has governed since then under the leadership of Roy Romanow and Lorne Calvert.

The Romanow government was more conservative than previous CCF/NDP governments, and instituted a program of hospital closures, program cuts, and privitization to eliminate the budget deficit and reduce debt inherited from previous governments. Romanow later quipped that he was a supporter of Tony Blair's Third Way concept before it even existed, and there were many who doubted the party's continued commitment to democratic socialism. The NDP's Third Way alienated some of its left-wing members, who left the party and merged with the Green Party supporters to form the New Green Alliance.

In the 1999 provincial election, Romanow's NDP received slightly less popular support as a share of the vote than the opposition Saskatchewan Party led by Elwin Hermanson, a past Reform MP. Romanow and his government formed a coalition government with the three elected Liberal MLAs; one, Jack Hillson, subsequently left cabinet to sit as an independent Liberal in opposition. Jim Melenchuk and Ron Osika remained in the coalition and ran under the NDP banner in the 2003 provincial election.

Following the 2003 general election, the NDP, now led by Lorne Calvert, was able to form a government on its own with a majority in the Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan of only one.

An irony of recent Saskatchewan NDP history is that despite starting in the 1930s as a party of rural discontent, it had by the 1990s lost almost all of its rural seats and found its greatest strength in Saskatchewan's cities. However, the share of the rural vote still dedicated to the NDP has still remained strong, although has not produced substantial wins in the first-past-the-post voting system.

Two by-elections have occurred since the 2003 election. Both of these by-elections have brought disastrous results for the Saskatchewan NDP. In the June 19, 2006 by-election for the riding of Weyburn-Big Muddy the party finished in third place with just under 24% of the vote behind the Saskatchewan Party, who picked up 49% of the vote, and the Liberal Party of Saskatchewan, who ended up with 27% of the vote. In the March 5, 2007 by-election for the riding of Martensville the party only garnered 10.5% compared to the Saskatchewan Party candidate who picked up 77% of the vote. Results such as these are worrisome for a party who is expected to call another general election by the end of 2007 and have been unable to capitalize on its status as a "have" province according to the federal government's transfer formula.

Recently the Saskatchewan NDP government caucus has come under fire concerning their conduct with respect to sexual harassment in the civil service. In a disgusting show of the NDP government's true colours, the Minister for the Public Service, Pat Atkinson, was quoted, in response to allegations concerning sexual harassment in the public service, "“We enjoyed it actually on our side of the house.”[1]

Party leaders

See also

Notes


Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Saskatchewan_New_Democratic_Party&oldid=118797006"