NDP working to strengthen connect to rural life - and voters

It’s no secret that in recent years, outside of the province’s larger cities the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party (NDP) hasn’t enjoyed the same popularity it once did. With an election set for October 28, taking a step back in time and looking at neighbouring provinces offers some different and valuable perspectives on the party’s campaign.

From a landslide victory in the 1991 election, with Roy Romanow’s New Democrats taking a commanding 55 of 66 seats in the legislature, to the party taking a measly 13 of 61 under the leadership of Ryan Meili in 2020, it’s apparent that something has gone horribly wrong.

Several contributing factors are involved in the party’s lack of rural support over the years, including changes throughout the province and within the party itself, according to Dr. Tom McIntosh, a professor in the department of politics and international studies at the University of Regina. 

“Their biggest problem is getting back to building a party in the rural parts of the province,” says McIntosh, who has spent over 20 years of studying politics with a focus on rural health care and policy.

“You can go back to Tommy Douglas, you can go back to Allan Blakeney – they had significant support in rural Saskatchewan,” he continues.

Douglas, leading the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation to victory against the Liberal Party of Saskatchewan, won the largest-ever majority that any variation of the NDP has won in Saskatchewan in 1944, with 47 seats out of 52. 

Meanwhile, Blakeney toppled the incumbent Liberal Party and brought the New Democrats into the legislative assembly as a majority government in 1971 with a solid 45 seats out of 60.

Prior to the election call this year, the Saskatchewan NDP held 14 seats, only one of which – the northern constituency of Cumberland – is in a rural riding.

“Since losing to [Saskatchewan Party leader Brad Wall] in 2007, they’ve been an urban caucus,” McIntosh says, referring to the election in which the party was forced into opposition under Lorne Calvert, the last NDP premier of the province.

A changing farming landscape
One large contributing factor is that agriculture as we know it is nothing like it was in the NDP’s rural heyday.

When the Saskatchewan NDP started out as the Farmer-Labour Party in 1932, farmers were instrumental to its rise. The party was a founding member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a nationwide party and federal NDP predecessor dedicated to toppling Canadian capitalism in favour of democratic socialism in the wake of the Great Depression. The party’s proposals, including government-regulated wages, unemployment insurance, and universal health care, were deemed radical at the time, with the 1934 Saskatchewan provincial election seeing the new Farmer-Labour Party win only five seats, all rural ridings.

At the time, the party’s main focus provincially and federally was improving the quality of life for farmers and working-class Canadians through socio-political reform. Much has clearly changed since then.

Today, as a result of extensive farm consolidation that has seen the size of the average farm in Saskatchewan more than triple via land acquisition by large-scale operations, the agriculture industry has been substantially reshaped.

“Saskatchewan has changed,” says McIntosh. “The family farm is less of a thing than it ever has been, and more and more of the farm, more and more of the agriculture, is being done by large, corporate-type entities.”

“It’s not that traditional image we have of a family farm,” he continues. “Then of course there are some very large economic interests involved in agricultural production today, so agriculture has changed,” and part of that change, McIntosh notes, is that the industry has become more conservative-minded.

Traditional farming has certainly changed, but the significance of agriculture in Saskatchewan remains clear. Under the Saskatchewan Party government, the province’s international agriculture sales totalled $20.2 billion in 2023, with agricultural exports increasing 74 per cent since 2013. Agriculture has been a clear priority for the ruling party, with Premier Scott Moe instituting a provincial sales tax exemption for crops, livestock and more in 2018.

While today’s agriculture industry is much more corporate than it ever was in the Farmer-Labour Party’s time, the Saskatchewan NDP has made a point of indicating that it still considers farmers a priority.

In 2022, the party officially incorporated an Agriculture and Rural Life Committee dedicated to recognizing the important role that agriculture and rural communities play in Saskatchewan’s economy and society.

The committee’s creation is a promising start, but its work remains somewhat vague. Its goals of “fighting to stop rural health care closures, improve education, advocate for better rural internet, address access to markets and the rising costs of inputs, demand better agricultural support programs that reflect 21st century agriculture, and help communities respond to the impact of climate change on agriculture” fail to convincingly demonstrate what the NDP would do to improve agriculture and rural life as it relates to many people’s rural identities, compared to the relative success of the Saskatchewan Party, under which the corporate agricultural industry has thrived, despite the cost to the traditional family farm.

“The NDP, of course, has chosen to focus on a lot of issues that have greater support or more salience in urban areas than in rural areas,” says McIntosh. 

Breaking down a rural vs urban mentality
Under Ryan Meili’s leadership, the NDP’s campaign during the 2020 provincial election put forward a platform focused on issues such as imposing a wealth tax, investing millions to build mental health emergency rooms, and restoring Saskatchewan’s film tax credit.

These proposals may have earned the party points in the bigger cities, but not so much in rural ridings.

Some of the NDP’s current proposals to cut costs certainly have the potential to resonate with all Saskatchewanians, such as suspending the gas tax for six months and removing the provincial sales tax from children’s clothes.

However, many voters may be wondering how high those promises are on the party’s list of priorities. Many other elements of the party’s platform are often viewed as catering primarily to urban voters, including addictions, homelessness, and mental health. As with other parts of their platform, including 2SLGBTQIA+ policy development and public outreach, these may have larger pools of support within urban centres, but are just as important for rural communities, if only the NDP can convince rural voters of their impact and importance. 

The NDP’s focus on these issues is undeniably a major contributing factor to the party’s success in Regina, Saskatoon, Prince Albert and Moose Jaw, but is unlikely to help the party flip any of the conservative-dominated rural ridings. In fact, it could even serve to alienate those voters further, and with rural constituencies outnumbering urban ones on the Saskatchewan electoral map, their votes are critical.

To that end, leader Carla Beck has made a point of highlighting her own rural roots. Some of her campaign materials mention her childhood on a farm near the village of Lang — to many, including McIntosh, this effort to be relatable comes off as disingenuous.

“She hasn’t lived on a farm in [over 20] years … you can’t pretend you know all about rural Saskatchewan if you haven’t lived there in [over 20] years,” he says. 

Beck is doing her part to boost the NDP’s popularity in rural ridings ahead of the upcoming election. On September 19, the party unveiled their Northern Strategy, plans for northern Saskatchewan which include hiring more health-care practitioners, increasing funding for education and investing in maintenance on Highways 155 and 123 to ensure safety in northern Saskatchewan. This followed two days of outreach in Athabasca, the rural riding the party lost in 2022.

In spite of that, the perceived disconnect from rural constituents is a major issue, one that McIntosh says is keeping many from taking the party seriously.

“I think what they really need is some reasonably prominent rural residents to pick up the flag and run as New Democrats in rural ridings,” he says. “Until they can attract strong rural candidates, they’re gonna have a real problem overcoming the perceptions in rural Saskatchewan that the party doesn’t speak for them.”

The party has found candidates for all 61 constituencies, but McIntosh believes there needs to be a focus on getting the right people to take up the mantle.

“You’re usually looking for someone who has some standing in the community, is well-known,” he says. “[The NDP] don’t seem to be attracting those people as candidates. What they’re doing is they’re putting names on ballots, but they’re not finding serious people.”

The party won two rural seats in 2020, both electoral districts in northern Saskatchewan: Athabasca, which the NDP lost to the Saskatchewan Party in a 2022 by-election after incumbent MLA Buckley Belanger resigned; and Cumberland, where long-serving MLA Doyle Vermette, who has held the seat since 2008, will not be seeking re-election. 

Bridging the gaps
The problem extends beyond just candidates, with McIntosh noting that there needs to be a shift in the demographics of party volunteers and supporters in rural ridings if they want to see a change.

“A lot of their constituency associations in rural Saskatchewan … they don’t have a lot of members. They don’t have a lot of activity around them. They don’t have a lot of younger, more energetic people coming to the party,” he says.

Young people have certainly been central to the NDP’s momentum, with data recently recorded through polling by the Angus Reid Institute indicating strong support from 18-to-34-year-old voters. 

That same polling, dated August 22, indicates that the New Democrats enjoy majority support in Regina at 58 per cent and Saskatoon at 50 per cent. Despite that, a majority of voters outside of the two biggest cities, 57 per cent, have indicated that they support the Saskatchewan Party.

“They may take seats in some of the smaller cities like Prince Albert and Moose Jaw, but the really fully rural seats are going to stay strongly in the Sask Party fold, and that’s been a problem for the NDP for a long time,” says McIntosh.

Unfortunately for the Saskatchewan NDP and its urban support, the rural vote is necessary if the party wants to win.

“You cannot win in this province with just urban seats because the distribution of seats is weighted in such a way that about half the seats are rural, and so you have to win at least a few of them in order to form government,” says McIntosh.

This electoral structure is a major obstacle for the party in Saskatchewan, and is one of the factors distinguishing the province from others where the NDP has enjoyed recent success.

The British Columbia New Democratic Party, for example, has been in power as a minority government since 2017 and won with a majority in 2020. 

“B.C. is one of the least-rural provinces in the country and has been for a long time, and so the voter base is very different,” explains McIntosh. 

Meanwhile, he attributes the success of the Manitoba NDP, in power as of last year, to that party doing a better job connecting with rural ridings.

“They maintained a stronger rural connection in Manitoba,” he points out, noting that southern Manitoba still votes conservative for the most part.

“They also had a new, very young dynamic leader in Wab Kinew. He’s a very dynamic, media-savvy kind of guy, and that has certainly helped in building support in the party.”

Having a charismatic leader is a crucial part of appealing to more voters, as is the case in Alberta, where newly-elected Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi’s leadership campaign gave the party’s membership a considerable boost in numbers.

The Alberta NDP benefits from a differently-structured electoral map, one in which the party only needs to sweep the 46 seats of Calgary and Edmonton to win a majority in the province’s 87-seat legislative assembly, as McIntosh notes.

“You could, theoretically at least, not have to worry as much about rural Alberta as the NDP would have to worry about rural Saskatchewan in order to form government,” he says.

An independent NDP identity
Among many issues that unite the NDP branches throughout Canada, one stands out: defederation from the federal NDP.

Nenshi indicated in an interview with Sask Dispatch that he is keen on splitting his party from Jagmeet Singh’s party.

“I think tying us to people whose values we might not entirely share, that we don’t have control over, costs more than it benefits,” he said.

The issue of defederation from the federal party has arisen as a topic of discussion in Saskatchewan, with Angus Reid’s data indicating that while approximately half of the province’s voters would not be swayed by whether the Saskatchewan NDP defederates, a resounding 28 per cent say it would make them more likely to vote for Beck’s party, outnumbering the 17 per cent who say it would lower their chances of voting for the provincial party.

Beck indicated in a written statement to this journalist on August 14 that she is open to leaving the decision of defederation to the membership, though it is not a priority for the party at this time.

“We have been quite clear about where we disagree and the fact that we are separate from the federal party… All that said – with less than 80 days until the election we are focused on that goal right now and are in a race. This decision will be up to the membership,” she wrote.

The federal party’s relative unpopularity in the province is only one of many barriers to the NDP successfully reclaiming government – ultimately, Saskatchewan’s electoral structure makes it essential for the party to get at least some of the rural vote in order to win.

“It’s just very hard to attract good candidates, good leadership, financial donations,” says McIntosh on the party’s support in rural ridings.

“Right now it looks like the NDP are poised to finish with a much larger caucus than they went into the election with [but] it doesn’t yet look like they’re poised to be a serious threat to whether Scott Moe stays premier or not.”