GREEN IS THE COLOUR , Political Despair, and the Affective Politics of the “Rider Nation”

Justin Leifso PhD Candidate University of

Presented at the Canadian Political Science Association Annual Conference , Ontario June 1, 2017

CONFERENCE WORKING DRAFT: Please do not cite without author’s permission

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INTRODUCTION

In 2016, the conservative1 Party and its two-term premier Brad Wall won a third consecutive majority government in Saskatchewan. Despite a waning economic outlook and a series of scandals including the discovery of a questionable land deal, Wall’s party improved on their previous electoral performances, winning their largest majority in the legislature and their largest share of the popular vote, and defeating the NDP’s leader in his own riding. It was, by any measure, an extraordinary victory for a party that had already won two impressive legislative majorities in 2007 and 2011. Wall’s popularity, however, was nothing new. For much of Wall’s reign as premier, he has remained Canada’s most popular, fuelling speculation about possible federal aspirations (Maclean’s 2016). As the Conservative Party of Canada seeks to re- establish itself after its 2016 defeat and resignation of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Wall’s popularity has made him a de facto leader of the country’s conservative movement, regularly sparring with centre-left leaders such as Prime Minister Trudeau and Alberta Premier Notley as he takes up conservative causes such as resisting carbon levies and calling for “caution” with respect to Canada’s acceptance of Syrian refugees. In this paper, I argue that Wall’s popularity is inextricably tied to Saskatchewan’s history of political despair. Created as part of a spatialized state-building project that assigned it a hinterland role in the national political economy, Saskatchewan’s history is one in which governments have sought to overcome this status and in which its residents have obsessed over its stagnation vis-à-vis the rest of Canada. Throughout this history, I argue, the have served as a convenient metaphor, allowing residents to see themselves as they see their football team: as scrappy underdogs. During the past decade, however, both the team and the province have experienced a turnaround in fortune. While Saskatchewan has prospered with high resource prices, the Roughriders have had their most successful decade. These successes have converged with the emergence of the so-called “Rider Nation” – a political identity that I argue is constructed upon a rejection of despair and the celebration of better times. It is through identification with and capitalization upon this Rider Nation identity that Wall has built his enormous popularity in the province. Ultimately, however, I argue that this form of political despair is an exclusionary one that privileges settler experiences of despair while erasing other forms of despair that are inherent to Saskatchewan (and Canada’s) very existence. The response to the death of Colten Boushie and the debate over resource royalty sharing demonstrate, I argue, the consequences of such erasure and the inability of this Rider Nation formulation to address – or even acknowledge – the longstanding inequities that exist in the province.

OUR KIDS ARE LEAVING: A Tale of Despair

Writing about the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, affect theorist Deborah Gould (2012) describes political despair as “feelings of political inefficacy and

1 The was founded in 1997 by the four sitting members of the Progressive Conservative (PC) Party of Saskatchewan and four defecting members of the Liberal Party of Saskatchewan to create an “alternative” to the ruling NDP. Though the party’s ideology has been somewhat malleable due to leader and context, it remains accepted that it was founded as, and remains, a centre-right party. 2 hopelessness, the sense that nothing will ever change, no matter what some imagined collective ‘we’ does to try to bring change.” Gould demonstrates the utility of the concept beyond AIDS activism, including those who opposed the Iraq War and, more broadly, the public during the Bush Wars. There have been few other specific examinations of political despair, though Grayson’s (1986) review of despair in cities that have undergone de-industrialization is consistent with those more recent interventions by affect theorists (e.g., Anderson 2006, 743) who refer to despair’s oppositional relationship to hope, particularly with respect to economic experiences such as unemployment. In the following section, I explore political despair in Saskatchewan. Political despair is, I argue, central to Saskatchewan experience and, subsequently, Saskatchewan politics. More particularly, understanding Brad Wall’s ongoing success means understanding the extent to which Wall and his Saskatchewan Party have established themselves as the solution to despair. This political despair has taken form through a collective anxiety centred on the province’s history of out- migration and perceived economic underperformance vis-à-vis the rest of Canada (and, especially, Alberta), dimensions of the Saskatchewan experience that result from Saskatchewan’s place within the Canadian political economy. As Brodie (1990) has demonstrated, Canadian political economists have long documented the spatial dimensions associated with the various periods of Canadian political development.2 No longer afforded free access to British markets and unable to secure free trade with the United States, Central Canadian political elites used the National Policy, comprised of a national tariff on goods, settlement of the Canadian West, and a trans-continental railroad, to construct an east-west economic union. One of the results of the strategy was a highly-regionalized state, with a new Canadian West created to provide wheat for consumption in Central Canada, a market for goods manufactured in Central Canada, and a boundary to stem American expansion (Fowke 1957). As the newly-arrived Western settlers arrived, displacing Indigenous peoples in the process, they were assigned a regionally-specific role in confederation centred upon ensuring the ongoing capital accumulation by Central Canadian elites. Lured to the new region through misleading advertising campaigns (Francis 1997), unable to purchase manufactured goods for agricultural production from cheaper and (and closer) American sources (Fowke 1957), and left with a political system that seemed centred on marginalizing their claims (Conway 2006), the Canadian West was created to serve as hinterland in relation to the economic centre in Ontario and Quebec. Rasmussen and Pitsula (1990) argue that Saskatchewan’s history has been characterized by efforts to overcome its spatialized place within confederation. More specifically, they argue that the province’s history of social democratic governments tells the story of political pragmatism, with provincial governments seeking to intervene in economic development, be it through the emergence of Crown Corporations, nationalization of industries such as potash or partnerships with private firms to construct “mega projects” such as oil upgraders in Lloydminster and Regina. Such projects have had some success, but as Fairbairn – writing in 2001 – argues, the results

2 Brodie (1989) provides an exhaustive review of how early Canadian political economists such as Innis (1962) and Fowke (1957) conceptualized the spatialized dimensions of Canada’s economic development strategies. It should be noted, however, that while this conceptualization of space is present in such works, it is Brodie that identifies them and makes them explicit. 3 have been mixed: “personal income per capita relative to that in other parts of Canada has fallen from a high point in the mid-1980s when it exceeded the national average, to about 93 percent of the national average in recent years,” leading to the widespread feeling that “no matter how much faster we run, we don’t get ahead” (Fairbairn 2001). As it has wrestled with how best to foster economic activity, Saskatchewan struggled to retain its residents. After an initial population boom in the early years of the province – growing from 257,000 in 1906 to 821,000 in 1926 (Li 2009) - the province’s population has remained essentially level for much of its history, holding steady around a million for over 80 years (Li 2009). Meanwhile, as Saskatchewan’s population remained flat since the 1930s, the rest of Canada grew; in 1941 the province’s population represented 8% of the country’s, a proportion that would shrink to 3% by 2001 (Li 2009). Underneath the aggregated figures and statistics of the province’s population lie painful stories and experiences of those who have left the province for “greener pastures,” those who have been left behind, and those wrestling with the decision of whether they should stay or leave. Novelist and non-fiction writer Sharon Butala has written that growing up in Saskatchewan resembles “a holding area where one waited impatiently till one was old enough to leave in order to enter the excitement of the real world (Quoted in Waiser 2005, 410). Ably (2009, 325) similarly wonders if it is “appropriate to think of Saskatchewan as a province that is incapable of holding onto its children – a province that squanders its considerable skills of fostering and nurturing on those who will become emegres?” Radio talk show host John Gormley recalls the pain of watching “our kids” leave the province for jobs in Alberta (Gormley 2010). Given the intensity of the feelings associated with it, it is perhaps unsurprising that population loss has been a constant theme in the province’s political narrative. The 1971 provincial election campaign was largely centred on policy options that would best stem the retreat of the family farm and the subsequent loss of population in the province (Stirling 2001). In the 1980s, the NDP opposition made political hay out of population loss, insisting that the Devine PC government would have to answer for its actions to “their grandchildren, if they’re still in Saskatchewan, if they don’t join the thousands that are fleeing the province” (Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly 1989, 37). Throughout the 1990s, the population of the province actually shrunk and the by the 2000s, had dipped under one million people for the first tine in decades (Government of Saskatchewan 2017). As Leader of the Official Opposition, Brad Wall demonstrated a rhetorical flourish that would later serve him as premier as he framed population loss and its associated despair as being solely the fault of the governing NDP:

And so people are being left behind. Parents are being left behind by their kids as they go pursue opportunities elsewhere. Grandparents are being left behind as families choose to pursue opportunities even though this province, with amazing potential, should be providing those opportunities here for those families. And when any of those decide to leave, Mr. Speaker, Saskatchewan loses a part of its future. (Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly 2006, 555)

That the stories and kids and grandkids leaving the province typically resulted with their arrival in Alberta fit neatly within broader anxiety about Saskatchewan’s economic malaise in comparison to its western neighbour, particularly in the last decades of the twentieth century. The 1980s in Saskatchewan was not a pleasant 4 decade. High interest rates and challenging circumstances led to difficult years in the agricultural sector. The government of the day, Grant Devine’s Progressive Conservatives, had made heavy use of optimism in their 1981 campaign, promising that Saskatchewan “could be so much more” than what had been offered by the historically successful CCF-NDP. A number of controversial decisions, however, made short work of such optimism. Devine attempted to privatize the province’s popular crown corporations, ran enormous budget deficits, and, in 1991, refused to pass a budget at all, instead funding the government’s operation through one-time payments authorized by the Lieutenant Governor meant to “bridge the gap” in times when the legislature would not approve such expenditures.3 The 1990s were similarly unkind: “The province had to deal with a declining population, especially in rural areas, struggling agriculture sector, a difficult fiscal reality, and a growing urban-rural split” (Blake 2008, 167). Roy Romanow’s NDP, faced with an enormous debt burden inherited from Devine and a federal Liberal government committed to addressing its own deficits by downloading fiscal responsibilities onto provinces, set on a course of austerity by raising taxes, cutting spending, and implementing “Third-Way”-type reforms to its social democratic mandate (Warnock 2004; Smith 2011). From this perspective, the prosperity of Alberta could seem otherworldly. Alberta, beneficiary of a wealth of oil and bitumen, saw dramatic economic growth in the 1990s and early 2000s as the worldwide price of oil increased dramatically and spurred rapid development of the province’s controversial tar sands. The Government of Alberta, buoyed by such oil prices, eliminated its provincial debt and its provincial sales tax (PST) and offered “Ralph Bucks” – one-time payouts of $400 for every adult Albertan (Fekete 2006). Comparing the bleak situation in Saskatchewan to the seemingly boundless Alberta wealth became a Saskatchewan pastime. The editorial board of the Star Phoenix noted that while Alberta had eliminated its debt by 2004, Saskatchewan still had over $11 billion in debt, and that in a “situation where our closest neighbour is debt free and running astronomical surpluses, [debt] will soon start to feel like a millstone around Premier Lorne Calvert’s neck” (Star Phoenix 2005). One political columnist wryly argued that Klein had the “heart-wrenching” task of sorting out how to decide to spend the provincial government’s enormous surpluses (Mandryk 2004). Another, comparing Alberta’s fiscal capacity to Saskatchewan’s, bemoaned Saskatchewan’s being “mired in debt and still digging ourselves in deeper” (MacPherson 2004). The comparison became an important tool for the NDP’s opponents, both in electoral politics and the media. A representative of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation argued that while Alberta eliminated its debt through strict fiscal discipline, for “Saskatchewan taxpayers the dream of debt freedom will not be achieved in our lifetimes – perhaps never” (McLean 2004). Such opponents argued that the difference between Alberta and Saskatchewan was due to the difference between the provinces’ “natural governing parties.” In Alberta, the Progressive Conservatives had been able to attract private sector investment due to their “business-friendly” policies. The NDP, unwilling to deploy policies that met some nominally neoliberal threshold, were unable to compete. University of professor and “Calgary School” member (McDonald

3 For an excellent account of the Devine government’s use of special warrants, Rasmussen 2001. For an account on his attempts to privatize and his approach to economic development in the province, see Rasmussen and Pitsula 1990. 5

2004) Barry Cooper argued that from “high public sector employment to an investment killing tax structure, Saskatchewan has put in place a wide range of incentives for innovative, skilled, entrepreneurial young people to leave. Not surprisingly, they have responded rationally to these incentives: their hearts may back the Saskatchewan Roughriders but their heads are at work in Alberta” (Cooper 2002, 4). In short, in the collective memory of many in Saskatchewan, the history of the province is the history a place that has not always been a particularly easy – or pleasant – place in which to live. Political despair and the ongoing feeling that the province would remain an underachiever within confederation, particularly when compared to both its early history and the ongoing success of its Albertan counterpart, remained a constant presence in the province’s political imagination.

IT’S A ROMANTIC THING: On Despair and Underdogs

Throughout its history of political despair, Saskatchewan has seen its reflection in its political football team, the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Originating as the Regina Rugby Club in 1910 before coming the “Roughriders” in 1924, the “Riders” have a deep history in the province. For much of this history, however, the Roughriders’ story was one characterized by mediocre results both as a football team and as an organization. In over 100 years of operation, the Roughriders have won only four championships – a statistical outlier in a league that vacillates between seven and nine teams. While the team found significant regular-season success in the 1960s and 1970s, the team only won a single Grey Cup in the era. The 1980s and 1990s, in contrast, were marked by no such regular-season success, with the 1989 Grey Cup win being the high point of a period much more commonly characterized by losing and an inability to compete with richer, larger market teams for skilled players. The team’s dismal on-field performance has been typically matched by the club’s mediocre business performance. Throughout much of its existence, the Roughriders club struggled to sell enough tickets – the CFL’s primary revenue source for much of its existence4 – to remain solvent. In 1986, the Friends of the Riders non-profit organization was founded in order to raise money for the financially struggling club, primarily through an annual lottery (Kelly 2001, 27).5 Throughout the 1990s, the team drew under 20,000 spectators to games, well below attendance required to break even (Davis 2009, 230). In 1997, the club’s finances were bad enough to warrant a telethon to raise enough money to keep the club afloat, ultimately needing an anonymous benefactor – eventually revealed to be the (NFL) – to keep the club financially viable (Davis 2009, 244). Perpetually teetering on ruin, the struggles of the Saskatchewan roughriders have mirrored those of the province in which they play.

4 This has changed somewhat in recent years. While gate receipts remain the Roughriders’ largest source of revenue, the proportion has shrunk over time. Other sources of revenue, including the team’s share of royalties from the CFL’s television deal with sports network TSN as well as the team’s successful merchandising operation, have grown significantly. 5 The Friends of the Roughriders Lottery has, since its inception, raised $18 million for the club. See Saskatchewan Roughriders. 2016. 2015-2016 Annual Report. [Online] Available: http://d3ham790trbkqy.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2015/11/10960-2015-16-SR- Annual-Report-FA.pdf. 6

Beyond a mere distraction from the despair associated with life in Saskatchewan, the Roughriders have served as a commonly-understood metaphor for the province and its people. For much of its history, the club has represented the personification of how white Saskatchewanians collectively imagined themselves – “underdogs” within confederation, struggling to survive in a hostile environment but resilient and determined enough to get by despite these circumstances. “The Roughriders,” writes Zackus, have “provided a focal point for opposition to more populous Canadian cities and provinces and great pride [has been] taken in beating teams from these larger cities and provinces” (Zackus 1999. 64). Indeed, the trope of Saskatchewan Roughriders-as- placeholder-for-Saskatchewan-people became a common one in their years of mediocrity. Asked about the Roughriders’ support, author of Roughriders’ history Green Grit Graham Kelly argued that “it’s a romantic thing – Saskatchewan people are this country’s quintessential underdogs, and other Canadians relate to that” (Quoted in MacLean’s 2001, 30). As such, the Roughriders allowed Saskatchewanians to embrace the province’s circumstances as “underdogs,” a more palatable image than one characterized by political despair. Interviewed by one of the province’s daily newspapers, an enthusiastic fan and Catholic priest observed that “Saskatchewan is a large province space-wise, but it’s a small province people-wise, and you’re always the underdog. Everybody you’re playing is bigger than you” (Hall 2013). Reflecting on such sentiments, Zackus wistfully argues that through much of its history, the club has provided an important “symbolic-institutional nexus” for the province, one around which a discursive sense of community could form: “The club has provided a forum through which common purpose was met, and can be met in the future” (Zackus 72). Saskatchewan’s traditional place in confederation has historically thus been projected onto its football team: an “underdog” that seeks to take pride in its humble existence rather than dwell on the political despair that its circumstances could warrant.

WE ARE NOT A WEE PROVINCE: Rejecting Despair

For some, however, the role of underdog is unacceptable. Underdogs are, after all, underachievers and losers. Recasting Saskatchewan as underdog, personified by a scrappy football team that gamely took on teams from Canada’s larger centres was perhaps helpful, but not enough to vanquish the feelings of political despair and inadequacy woven through anecdotes of children and grandchildren moving to Alberta for better jobs. And it was against this underachieving version of Saskatchewan that Brad Wall juxtaposed his vision for the province, and it is upon this juxtaposition that Wall has built his success as an enormously popular premier. A young economic development officer from Swift Current with a history of working within the Progressive Conservative Party (and as a DJ on the local Swift Current radio station), Wall had been first elected in 1999 and quickly became one of the party’s most prominent MLAs, leading the party’s assault on the NDP government’s record of “wasting” public resources through the province’s various Crown Corporations.6 Following the

6 In particular, Wall used his role as critic for the province’s Crown Investments Corporation to launch relentless critiques at the government during the province’s daily Question Period. Wall framed the government’s business investments as “hare-brained business schemes” that “continue to blow millions of taxpayers’ dollars.”6 As a whole, these6 investments soon came to be understood as wasteful and, with losses such as SPUDCO primarily affecting rural areas, symptomatic of the NDP’s urban-centric nature, 7

Saskatchewan Party’s loss in the 2003 election, an election the party was widely expected to win, party leader and former Reform Party Member of Parliament (MP) Elwin Herminson stepped down as leader, triggering a leadership race that Wall won by acclamation when no other candidate appeared. Wall’s strategy as Leader of the Opposition was centred on framing the province’s history of NDP governments as the underlying cause of the province’s political despair. This strategy was based on two premises: that the NDP’s reign was insufficiently devoted to neoliberal policies, and, relatedly, that NDP governments were satisfied with mediocrity. Wall relentlessly argued that the NDP represented an outdated, burdensome brand of social democracy that stunted the province’s economic potential. Wall made constant appeals to losses incurred by provincial Crown Corporations, particularly those incurred by the Crowns’ overseas investments. Meanwhile, attempts by the NDP government to generate economic development, particularly in its rural areas, came under scrutiny when such experimentations fell short.7 Saskatchewan Party critics made repeated references to the Regina Manifesto – the CCF-NDP’s founding document that calls for an to Canadian capitalism – to mock the government for its devotion to a failed ideology. Saskatchewan Party MLA DF “Yogi” Huygabaert, former military pilot and future cabinet minister, argued that his foray into politics was merely part of a “life-long fight against communism” (Wishlow 2001, 176). For Wall and the Saskatchewan Party, the socialism espoused by the New Democrats – notwithstanding the deeply neoliberal version of social democracy offered by the NDP in the 1990s – was smothering the market and thus sabotaging any chance the province had to lift itself out of its traditional malaise. Saskatchewan, Wall argued, was blessed to have bountiful natural resources such as potash, oil, and uranium. For it to have struggled so consistently throughout its history must have been the result of the NDP’s stifling socialism. Wall embedded this critique of the NDP’s insufficiently neoliberal policies within a problematization of the broader discursive landscape of NDP governance. For him, the NDP’s policies were symptomatic of the party’s larger satisfaction with a mediocre Saskatchewan. New Democrats, according to Wall, pursued mediocre socialist policies because they expected mediocrity for the province. He took umbrage with the use of the phrase “wee province” – first used by NDP premier and idol of the party Tommy Douglas – in their rhetoric: I recall very clearly the Premier [Calvert] standing in his place here and in the rotunda and other public venues where he often referred to Saskatchewan as a wee province, w-e-e. A wee province. Mr Speaker, a have province is not a wee province. A have province is a strong province. It’s a prosperous province. It has largeness in terms of its capabilities, its strength, its ability to contribute to other people’s weaknesses. We are not a wee province, and yet the Premier has

strengthening opposition’s claims that the government had both forgotten or abandoned rural Saskatchewan and was a poor manager of the public purse. 7 In one example, in 1996 the Government of Saskatchewan entered into a “partnership” with a third party to invest funds into a potato storage and processing facility in the west-Central part of the province. Eventually the deal fell through and the media and opposition uncovered the details of the relationship between the government and third party, which was essentially characterized by the government investing money and taking all the risk for the deal while using its relationship to the third party to cast the illusion that the deal was the result of private investment. See Perrins 2001. 8

consistently referred to this place as a wee province. (Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly 2004, 1763)

By focussing on the NDP’s apparent self-deprecating rhetoric, unambitious goals,8 and “tired” style of socialism, Wall effectively argued that the NDP were the reason Saskatchewan had underperformed for much of its history and were, consequently, the cause of political despair. As the 2007 provincial election drew closer, Wall moved to make himself and the Saskatchewan Party as symbols of optimism. In the party’s platform, the NDP are repeatedly referred to as the “tired, old” NDP who have, “for too long … squandered Saskatchewan’s tremendous potential” (Saskatchewan Party 2007, 2), juxtaposing it with the Saskatchewan Party, who represented a “new” Saskatchewan and the possibility for a “government with the positive vision for the future that will realize this potential” (Saskatchewan Party 2007, 24). As Enoch (2011, 199) notes, Wall essentially created a “binary opposition between the future and the past, with the province’s social democratic past responsible for stagnation and lethargy, while the neoliberal future is associated with optimism and prosperity.” A vote for the Saskatchewan Party became an important first step in rejecting despair. Wall’s optimism carried through to the election. On November 7, 2007, the Saskatchewan Party won 38 of the province’s 52 electoral seats, a large majority and the end of sixteen years of NDP governments. Wall moved quickly to announce that, with the NDP defeated, the days of political despair in Saskatchewan were over and that better days were ahead, shepherded by him and his party. The night of the election, after ballots were counted and the Saskatchewan Party were deemed victorious, Wall took to the stage at his campaign headquarters in Swift Current: “Today we are on the verge of greatness I believe, we are on the verge of an economic breakthrough, a chance to convert some momentum into lasting prosperity. We’re on the verge of Saskatchewan taking its rightful place in the vanguard of this country, leading the west and leading Canada” (Quoted in Wood 2007). Wall’s rhetoric of better days fortuitously coincided with a legitimate turnaround in the political economy of the province. What Wall failed to mention in his critiques of the NDP in the last year of its government was that in 2005-2006, the provincial economic outlook was bright. World commodity prices began to dramatically rise and as they grew, so too did the profits being made by resource companies in the province and, ultimately, the royalties those firms paid to the government. The rise in prices led to increase capital investment in natural resources and a larger number of high-paying jobs. In 2006, the province’s long history of out-migration seemed to turn around and over the next ten years, the province grew by thirteen percent, an enormous rate of growth given its historical stagnation (Government of Saskatchewan 2017). For Wall, the convergence between his winning and the turnaround in the political economy of the province offered a timely opportunity. After framing the NDP as being inseparable from the province’s political despair, the apparent turnaround in Saskatchewan’s fortunes

8 Wall made political hay out of the NDP government’s unwillingness to set goals. In one set of exchanges in 2006, for example, the NDP’s minister of health stated that the province was seeking to add more registered nurses (RNs) to healthcare facilities in the province, but refused to divulge how many more. Wall and his Saskatchewan Party capitalized on this unwillingness, both criticizing the NDP for its lack of goals (Mandryk 2006) and including the hiring of 800 additional RNs in its 2007 election platform (Saskatchewan Party 2007). 9 presented him with the opportunity to reinforce idea that it was he and the Saskatchewan Party who were the heralds of better times, linking himself and the party to the realization of the optimism he had promised while in opposition. Wall’s optimistic rhetoric also overlapped with the beginning of one of the most successful decades in the Roughriders’ history. Less than two weeks after Wall’s victory in the election, the Saskatchewan Roughriders won the 2007 Grey Cup. The championship, their first since 1989 and only the third in the team’s history, signalled the beginning of a highly successful decade to follow. The team would appear in the championship again in 2009 and 2010 – losing twice to the – before winning another championship in 2013 in Regina, one of only a handful of times in the modern CFL era that a team has won the Grey Cup when the game has been played in their home . In contrast to much of the team’s history, 2007-2017 has also been characterized by enormous business success. The team’s attendance woes have disappeared, with games regularly selling out and the team’s financial standing stabilizing accordingly. Over the last decade, the Roughriders have been the league’s most profitable team, fueled not only by regularly high attendance but also by corporate sponsorships and merchandise sales – third highest in all Canadian sports, behind only the and the (CBC News 2015). Reportedly selling 67% of the CFL’s merchandise, the team has been recognized for its marketing efforts and regularly named one of the country’s most recognizable brands (Calder 2012). Like the province, the outlook for the team has changed dramatically in the past decade. November 2007 thus serves as a striking crossroads for many in the province, one during which the circumstances that underwrote political despair seemed to vanish. As Leader of the Opposition, Brad Wall had offered a brand of optimism that juxtaposed the potential of Saskatchewan with the political despair he pinned on the province’s history of NDP governments. Suddenly, it seemed that such optimism was being realized. Affect theorist Lauren Berlant (2011), writes about the “cruelty” of an unachievable optimism, an optimism that cannot be realized, and hope for a future that cannot be delivered. The Saskatchewan Party had offered an optimism that, in a broader context, was hardly original. Since the late 1970s, the Anglo-Western world has been inundated with the discourses of a neoliberal political rationality (Miller and Rose 2008; Larner 2004; Brown 2015), one that insists that “the market” can deliver prosperity and freedom for citizens, increasingly reconstituted as customer-clients. Neoliberalism’s perpetual crises (Peck and Theodore 2012; Brenner, Peck and Theodore 2012; Clarke 2008) have, of course, demonstrated that such optimism is inherently cruel, and with each new promise of prosperity or the “good life” (Berlant 2011) comes another manifestation of precarity. The market offers hope, and when that hope is met with disappointment, it can only be addressed through deeper faith in the market. Yet, with the turnaround in Saskatchewan’s economic outlook and the emergence of the Roughriders as a successful football club, it appeared the optimism offered by Wall had been realized. Almost immediately after casting off the burdensome socialist chains, Saskatchewan’s kids and grandkids began moving home, its football team was something to brag about, it was no longer a “have not” province within confederation, and its immediate future seemed bright. Berlant’s concept of the “good life” had ostensibly – finally – arrived. 10

SASKATCHEWINNERS: Capitalizing on Success and Optimism

The decade since Wall’s Saskatchewan Party took office has been one in which the Premier and the party have worked to reinforce the ties that bind the Saskatchewan Party and the realization of optimism, and capitalizing on the Roughriders’ decade of success has been an important tactic in the strategy. Wall has long included his Roughrider fandom as a part of his public persona. A pre-2007 election profile declared that Wall was a man who “loves his family, the Riders, Saskatchewan and politics” (Chabun and Hall 2007). While politicians are well-known for pandering to sports fans, Wall’s football fandom is both sincere and knowledgeable. He has regularly called into local sports radio shows to share football predictions for both CFL and NFL games, promoting a folksy persona as he jokes with radio hosts. Well-versed in the nuances of football, the Premier has heckled CFL referees for poor calls and other teams for supposedly “dirty” plays (Wall 2016, Twitter Post). In 2014, Wall posted a YouTube video ahead of the annual “” game against the Blue Bombers. In the video he attempted to play the banjo and then apologized to the camera saying he “wasn’t very good. Kind of like the Blue Bombers… at football” – a video that soon become a viral sensation in the province (Premier Brad Wall YouTube, 2013). In the 2007 Grey Cup, he travelled to Toronto to watch the game, escorting a young fan with terminal cancer in what would become a tradition (Dickson 2007). In 2013 when the Roughriders won the Grey Cup in Regina, he appeared in the locker room after the game, drinking champagne and beer out of the Grey Cup trophy whilst players poured champagne on him and each other – a regular part of the team (Huffington Post 2013). Wall and his allies have not only framed his fandom to promote his own personal “brand” but has deliberately sought to link the success of the Roughriders to the Saskatchewan Party and juxtapose that success with the dismal performance of the team during NDP years. In his anti-NDP polemic, Gormley explains that football is one of the criteria that separates “Saskatchewinners from “Saskatchewawhiners,” arguing that on “the issue of attitude, there is no bigger attitude boost than a winning season for our beloved Roughriders football team. A huge irritant for many New Democrats is the relationship between their party in power and the Riders hitting the pinnacle of success: winning the Grey Cup. In the storied 100 years of the Riders, they have only one the Grey Cup three times – never when NDP government is in office” (Gormley 2010, 62). The line of attack has become a common one; when the team announced the hiring of a new head coach in 2006, a Saskatchewan Party, Kevin Cheveldayoff, rose in the Legislative Assembly to congratulate the team while simultaneously mocking the NDP government of the day by pointing out that the Roughriders’ only “Grey Cup victories came at times when the NDP has been kicked out of office. In fact every other team in the league has won the Grey Cup at least three times while the NDP was in government here, while Rider fans were forced to suffer year after year under the NDP curse” (Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly 2006). This work to tie the Saskatchewan Party to the football team culminated in December 2010 when long-time Roughrider announced that he would be running for the Saskatchewan Party in the NDP stronghold of Regina-Dewdney, a seat he would win in the following 2011 election. Upon his election, Makowski mixed football references into a glowing reverence for the 11

Premier: “I think [Wall] and his team have done a great job for four years without me. On this team, I’m just a green rookie, and so I’ll just be trying to fit in and doing whatever I can to help Brad Wall, our ” (O’Connor 2011). That the Saskatchewan Party’s predominant colour, green, resembles that of the Roughriders is a convenient symbol of the work that Wall and the Party have put into linking the team’s success to the party’s reign.

WE HAD SAND KICKED IN OUR FACE FOR SO LONG: The Emergence of the “Rider Nation”

Wall’s efforts have sought to not only tie himself and his party to the team and its success, but also to the team’s fanbase – the “Rider Nation.” Emerging in the 2000s, the term “Rider Nation” has grown in popularity and is now synonymous with a fanbase that is synonymous with the province’s residents and expats. The team boasts about the Rider Nation on its website, specifically the willingness of those in the Rider Nation to travel from across Saskatchewan to Regina for home games and for those in other provinces to appear at away games (Roughriders 2017). Such displays extend beyond football. The enormous success of the Roughriders merchandise sales has led to a dizzying array of Roughrider branded objects. With each object, from the mundane jerseys, hats and t-shirts to more confusing screw covers, blazers, and kitchen strainers, comes an opportunity to perform Rider Nation membership. When travelling, it has become common practice to pose with Roughrider flags rather than the traditional prairie lily-dawned Saskatchewan flag (Pederson 2017). Pilgrimages to Taylor Field9 are performed by members of the Rider Nation weekly during the season, including many ticket-holders who drive two hours or more to Regina from Saskatoon, smaller cities or rural communities. Together, they cheer on the team, sing along with the Roughriders’ , Green is the Colour, and display elaborate Roughrider-themed costumes, such as “Rider Joker” and “Rider Ultimate Warrior.” It is now standard practice to display one’s identification with Saskatchewan through performances of their Rider Nation citizenship. In deeming their fans a “nation,” the Roughriders are neither alone nor original: the Steelers Nation, the Leafs Nation, the Cowboys Nation, the Raider Nation and the like. What is peculiar about the Rider Nation, however, is the extent to which it has been deployed as a political identity, predicated on the province and the team realizing their potential and rejecting despair. For, while Roughrider fandom has always been self-congratulatory with respect to its devotion to its teams (notwithstanding the decades of dismal attendance at home games), seeing itself as the plucky underdogs in the team, the most recent manifestation of the fanbase as “nation” has little use or time for such modesty. Indeed, the performances and outbursts of Rider Nation identity stand opposed to political despair, celebrating both its new status as a thing of the past and Saskatchewan’s new, rightful place in confederation. Rod Pedersen, the play-by- play announcer for Roughriders’ broadcasts on Saskatchewan radio stations, summed it up when he appeared on Toronto sports talk radio leading up to the 2013 Grey Cup in Regina. When prompted by the host’s musing that it was “hard to imagine

9 Taylor Field, most recently known as at Taylor Field, was home to the Roughriders until the 2016 season. In 2017, the team will move to the new Mosaic Stadium, a publicly-funded $278 million stadium. 12

Saskatchewan as underdogs,” Pedersen asked if they were talking about “the province or the team.” He then went on to discuss Wall’s symbolic brashness: “Our premier, 45- year-old guy, cool guy, sports fan, just shoves [Saskatchewan’s success] in people’s face. ‘Cause, really… we had sand kicked in our face for so long and the bully kind of grew up” (Blair 2013). After generations of feeling marginalized within confederation, previous expressions of modesty or humility are abandoned for brash displays of “Rider Pride,” and the rest of Canada should get used to it. The Roughriders historically served as a metaphor for Saskatchewan as underdog, and fandom meant performing the role of underdogs. Reimagined as the Rider Nation, however, fandom requires performing a rejection of that despair and announcing to the world that life in Saskatchewan is “the good life.” Belonging to the Rider Nation, in short, feels good. It involves rejecting despair, and celebrating the apparent “coming of age” of Saskatchewan, a Saskatchewan in which “next year” is now and futile exasperations that the future will be better are unneeded because the present is good. As McGrane (2011, 2) states, “residents of the province no longer feel as if they are inferior to their neighbours to the west or the east but, consistent with their status as a ‘have’ province, they are confident in their abilities and confident in their future.” By helping to form and coordinate this discursive construction, Wall and the Saskatchewan Party have captured it and centred it upon themselves. In early 2017, the Saskatchewan Party commemorated Wall’s thirteenth anniversary as leader of the party with a tweet of the premier taking a “selfie” with a young girl and a crowd behind them, all of whom, the Premier included, in green Roughriders jerseys (Saskatchewan Party 2017, Twitter Post). With the Saskatchewan Party’s green and yellow logo and yellow font in the foreground, the symbolism was clear: Brad Wall is not only the leader of the Saskatchewan Party and the , but also the leader of the “Rider Nation.” Wall had promised better days if he was to be elected, and it appeared as though he had delivered on that optimism. As long as Brad is around everything will be okay. In this context, Wall’s popularity is all but assured.

WHOSE DESPAIR? Exclusion and Inclusion in the Rider Nation

That the Saskatchewan political identity has become wrapped up in the Rider Nation is instructive, given the enormously loaded nature of “nation” as a concept. As Thobani (2007) and Abu-Laban (2009) have argued, embedded in the concept of nation comes implicit understandings of who belongs and who does not, categories that are delineated along contours of race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion. If a nation is an imagined community (Anderson 1983), then it includes all those categories of inclusion and exclusion imagined by the community, categories that include a sprawling collection of social relations, internal logics and discursive conceptualizations that indicate who belongs and how they should act. For the Rider Nation, membership is predicated on identification with and celebratory rejection of the political despair that has been so integral to the Saskatchewan experience. For those for whom that political despair is a defining feature of Saskatchewan, membership and belonging remain guaranteed. For others, though, membership into the Rider Nation is less certain. I argue that the despair upon which membership in the Rider Nation is centred is an exclusionary form of despair that privileges the experience of Saskatchewan’s white 13 settler residents, thus marginalizing the experiences of others. Saskatchewan, like the rest of the Canadian state, is a settler-colonial project. Indeed, there are few more obvious examples of colonialism than the right-angles and straight lines of both Saskatchewan’s borders and the checkered landscape descended from the original settlement surveys in the late 19th century (Richtik 1975). With little regard for natural topography or pre-existing territories, the vision of Saskatchewan is a quintessential representation of colonialism’s imprint on space. Similarly, the privileging of non- Indigenous Saskatchewanians’ experiences of political despair essentially imprints that despair over the forms of despair of Indigenous people, forms of despair inherent to the settler-colonial experience. For, while Eastern European settlers were struggling to break land to retain it as part of their agreement with the Crown, the land they were breaking was given to them only because Indigenous peoples had been displaced from it. And while Saskatchewan politics has long been obsessed with population loss and “our kids” moving away, these experiences seem incomparable to the state-sponsored processes of forcibly removing children from their families, cultures and identities. There is little room in the dominant form of despair for the experiences and stories of Neil Stonechild (Lugosi 2011; Green 2006), who died in the cold after being left on the outskirts of Saskatoon by city police in 1990, or Pamela George (Razack 2000), beaten to death by two white Regina university students, or the twelve-year old Indigenous girl raped by three twenty-something white men in rural Saskatchewan in 2001 (Ward 2014). The recent documentation of survivors’ experiences through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2016)10 makes clear what this erasure obscures: that deeply-embedded, heart-wrenching political despair was, and remains, an inherent part of Saskatchewan’s existence. The Rider Nation identity, like any national identity, is thus exclusionary. Membership of the Rider Nation is defined by the extent to which individuals are willing to celebrate Saskatchewan’s rejection of despair and its ascension to the status of a great province. It is dependent upon a settler-centric experience, one that insists that, while life in Saskatchewan was at one point difficult, those times are a thing of the past. Inclusion into and exclusion from the Rider Nation is governed both discursively and institutionally. Discursively, the Rider Nation serves as an impermeable normative orthodoxy that marginalizes dissent. Bringing attention to those instances where all is not well becomes tantamount to a crime against the Rider Nation. Speaking out in opposition to the orthodoxy identifies one as what Ahmed (2010) calls an affective alien, someone who questions good feelings and thus alienates themselves. For Ahmed, such affective aliens must approach orthodoxy cautiously, and a choice must be made during the moment when they are tempted to speak out: “Power speaks here in this moment of hesitation. Do [they] go along with it? What does it mean not to go along with it? To create awkwardness is to be read as awkward. Maintaining public comfort requires that certain bodies ‘go along with it,’ to agree to where [they] are placed” (Ahmed 2010). To use the lexicon of governmentality theorists, such potential trouble-makers begin to governi themselves per what is considered okay, governing their own behaviour based on what is widely understood to be socially or politically acceptable (Miller and Rose 2008).

10 Indeed, one of the sections of the TRC’s report on survivors’ stories is titled “Despair,” and recounts the experiences of residential school survivors’ memories of suicide. 14

The death of Colten Boushie demonstrates how impermeable to criticism this orthodoxy can be. In 2016, a group of Indigenous youths pulled into the farmyard of white farmer Gerald Stanley. The details of a confrontation remain unclear and the subject of criminal investigation, but the following moments resulted in Stanley shooting and killing Colten Boushie, one of the young men in the vehicle. Upon Stanley’s arrest and being charged with second-degree murder, tensions flared as supporters of both victim and suspect began to clash online and in the media. Stanley’s supporters insisted that rural crime was “out of control” and that property owners were entitled to defend their property. Fundraising efforts emerged in the form of steak nights and crowd-funding sites to support Stanley’s legal fees, with supporters saying that the Stanleys were “awesome people” who deserved the community’s support. Online, others were less careful with their words. On a rural Saskatchewan Facebook page, commenters stated that it “sure would be nice to hear from the farmer himself instead of all the natives spreading the victim crap,” that Stanley’s “only mistake was leaving three witnesses”11 and called Boushie a “fucking Indian” (Piapot 2016). The racist online comments compelled Wall to post his own statement, insisting that such comments were “unacceptable, intolerant and a betrayal of the very value and character of Saskatchewan.” Interestingly, while many supported the popular premier’s comments, others pushed back against Wall’s call for decency. Commenters insisted that it was not “an issue” of race but rather about a farmer defending his property and that the real issue at hand was “racism [toward] white people,” who can “be discriminated upon more than any other race and no one faces any repercussions” (Wall 2016, Facebook). Revealingly, some commenters expressed difficulty reconciling their admiration for Wall with their disappointment that he would condemn online hatred: “you know, I support you Brad, BUT... Racism does indeed go both ways, and yes it needs to stop, everyone needs to stop it, though Brad... I am very pissed off at you… [sic, entire quote]” (Ibid). The issue remains a tense one, and the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities recently passed a resolution calling on the federal government to allow rural property more leeway in “defending” their property, citing the same apparent rise in rural crime that Stanley’s supporters have suggested justify Boushie’s death (SARM 2017). That Wall himself was the target of blowback suggests that the orthodoxy that the Rider Nation represents has institutionalized itself in some form beyond Wall and the Saskatchewan Party, its impermeability demonstrated by even the Premier’s own inability to call into question its marginalizing tendencies. Within the discursive landscape of this orthodoxy, public policy that seeks to ameliorate historical inequities find unwelcoming audiences. In the 2011 election the NDP made it a platform position to share resource royalty revenue from commodities such as potash and oil with First Nations in the province. Wall’s response was nothing short of indignation. Wall “categorically rejected” the premise, claiming that entering a revenue-sharing agreement with First Nations amounted to making “special deals,” (Saskatchewan Party 2011). Wall argued that “the natural resource revenue of the province belongs to all people – belongs to everybody equally” (CBC News 2011). Less diplomatic was Saskatchewan Party MLA , who expressed concern that if such a deal was struck, the funds from resource royalty revenue could be used by

11 This remark was made by Ben Krautz, a councillor in the Rural Municipality (RM) of Browning. Upon media questioning whether an elected official should be making such statements, his wife and a fellow counsellor suggested that rural residents had been subjected to increasing rural crime and that as 15

Indigenous individuals for “drugs and alcohol” (Chabun 2011). The NDP’s proposed policy of resource revenue sharing remained deeply unpopular in opinion polling and after an embarrassing performance in the 2011 election that saw its leader, Dwayne Lingenfelter, lose his seat, the NDP abandoned the policy (Langenegger 2011). Within the broader political rationality of the Rider Nation, policy mechanisms such as resource revenue sharing remain politically unacceptable, a sign not of the urge to ameliorate historical injustice but rather another example of “special interest” making unfair, undeserved demands on the greater population (Brodie 2008). As Thobani (2007, 6-7) theorizes, having “overcome great diversity in founding the nation, these subjects face numerous challenges from outsiders – ‘Indians,’ immigrants, and refugees – who threaten their collective welfare and wellbeing.” The Rider Nation, having overcome the political despair by ridding themselves of burdensome socialists in favour of the optimism of the Saskatchewan Party, thus represents a type of exalted national subject that has little use or time for claims that would suggest that all is not well.

Conclusion

Despite the problematic dimensions of the “Rider Nation” in terms of how it casts settler-colonialism in Saskatchewan (or, perhaps, because of it), the strategy has been remarkably successful. In a province that is typically understood to have a social democratic political culture,12 the conservative Wall has remained the most popular premier in the country for almost all his tenure as premier. Yet, pillars of the strategy have become unstable in recent months. The political economy of the province, which benefited Wall for much of the last decade, has undergone significant change. Prices for natural resources, including petroleum, potash and uranium, have dropped to the point where the provincial government now faces large budgetary deficits and is musing over drastic cuts to programs, services, and public servant salaries. Similarly, the decade of success that the Roughriders enjoyed leading up until 2013 has made way to a series of deeply disappointing seasons. Popular players have been traded or released, attendance has dropped, and the volume of merchandise that helped produce the team’s highly profitable seasons, has been reduced to much lower levels. Similarly, there are early signs that the Saskatchewan Party’s seemingly impermeable popularity is more vulnerable than the 2016 election would show. Despite a landslide victory in 2016 that saw the NDP losing its second leader in as many elections, a New Democrat recently won a bye-election in Saskatoon triggered by the death of a Saskatchewan Party MLA. Following a deeply austere 2017 budget that cut, among other things, funding for the province’s public libraries, the publicly-owned bus company that primarily served rural, elderly and disabled residents, and funeral expenses for low-income individuals while simultaneously cutting corporate tax rates, the popularity of both the Saskatchewan Party and Brad Wall have dropped to their lowest point in a decade. Perhaps most tellingly, at a recent CFL event in Regina,

12 Wesley 2011. It should be noted here that, despite the popular imagery of social democratic Saskatchewan, there has always been an undercurrent of authors who have noted a deeply-rooted conservatism – particularly social conservatism in the province. In 1968, for example, Saskatchewan political scientist Evelyn Eager wrote that “contrary to the legend of radicalism which has grown up about Saskatchewan political life, the electorate of the province has shown the traditional conservatism of a farming population.” See Eager 1969. 16 attended by Roughrider fans, Wall was booed upon his appearance onstage – an enormously out-of-character demonstration by the Rider Nation. Though the Saskatchewan Party remains more popular than the majority of other premiers in the country, and, more importantly, more popular than the Saskatchewan NDP, it seems that when everything is palpably not well, the ties that bind the Rider Nation to its leader become more pliable. Yet the lasting legacy of Wall’s deployment of the Rider Nation goes beyond the electoral fortunes of his party. While it helps to explain how he and the Saskatchewan Party have remained so enormously popular in the province, there are deeper and longer-lasting consequences of the orthodoxy that the Rider Nation represents. That political success in the province is so closely bound to the erasure of the marginalization inherent to the province’s existence is both instructive and deeply problematic. It suggests that, regardless of what political party finds itself in power after Wall leaves office, it will be all but impossible to address issues of reconciliation or decolonization, issues that will likely remain politically off-limits. That despair is now so closely associated with the social democracy of the NDP and overcoming despair is so closely associated with market-led policies of the Saskatchewan Party also suggests that policies that seek to ameliorate economic inequality seem equally unlikely. The reactions to Colten Boushie’s death and the proposal for formalized revenue sharing demonstrate the fierceness with which orthodoxy will resist alternative perspectives or political arrangements. Wall’s popularity also demonstrates the extent to which emotive politics needs to be taken seriously in political science. Any studious observer of Saskatchewan and its politics will doubtlessly see the extent to which issues such as out-migration and economic stagnation have dominated the province’s political discourse. Certainly, such observations inform many excellent interventions on Saskatchewan politics. Yet, there are few if any explicit examinations of the affective dimensions of these struggles. Political science’s ongoing quest to patrol its epistemological and ontological borders means that phenomena such as Saskatchewan’s political despair, so clearly an important presence in the province’s politics, remain on the “private” side of the arbitrarily-drawn public-private divide. But given the success of Brexit and Donald Trump, it seems both short-sighted and naïve to suggest that such distinctions should continue to define the discipline’s methods and theories. By ignoring affective politics in those instances, such as in Saskatchewan, where they seem so obvious, political science sabotages its own ability to fully explore political phenomena.

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