Make no mistake, there’s a federal election coming.
Just watch your television, read your daily newspaper or listen to the news on your favorite radio station.
Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative leaders Stockwell Day and Joe Clark are both running in byelections, but methinks they should save their money and rhetoric for the real thing.
If you think you’ve had enough now of prime minister Jean ChrŽtien and his Liberal caucus members in your face in the newspaper and on television, and if you’re bored with the news that yet another person is running for a Canadian Alliance party nomination, just hold onto your hat. There’s more to come.
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Some people are touting Oct. 23 as a possible election day. The prime minister isn’t giving hints.
We sincerely hope it will be sooner rather than later, because of one thing you can be sure: no meaningful business of the country will be done until this election is out of the way.
On the provincial scene, one can only wish that an election were in the offing. Summer is often called the silly season in politics, but this summer has carried silliness to new extremes.
The governing party (or parties, depending on your viewpoint) appears to be getting more out of touch with rural Saskatchewan. First there was word from on high at the highways department that farmers should haul all their grain in winter. Then last week there was a tempest in a teapot over the formation of a committee that hasn’t been announced yet.
That is, it has been but it hasn’t.
Confused? You’re not alone.
In last December’s throne speech, the government said it would set up a committee on the rural economy made up of representatives from groups that were part of the October delegation to Ottawa seeking more federal funds for agriculture. Nine months later, the committee was announced, sort of, in the Regina Leader Post.
No formal announcement about the Agricultural Committee on the Rural Economy will be made until the middle of this week.
Have we learned anything from this?
Probably not, but the notion that the government of Saskatchewan is out of touch with its rural constituents has been reinforced. It should hire some rural people as advisers before the rural-urban gap, which the government says doesn’t exist, becomes an unbridgeable chasm.
At best, we’ve picked up some trivia for our next dinner party. We now know the gestation period for government committees, as for babies, is nine months.
