GREEN IS the COLOUR Brad Wall, Political Despair, and the Affective Politics of the “Rider Nation”
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
GREEN IS THE COLOUR Brad Wall, Political Despair, and the Affective Politics of the “Rider Nation” Justin Leifso PhD Candidate University of Alberta Presented at the Canadian Political Science Association Annual Conference Toronto, Ontario June 1, 2017 CONFERENCE WORKING DRAFT: Please do not cite without author’s permission 1 INTRODUCTION In 2016, the conservative1 Saskatchewan Party and its two-term premier Brad Wall won a third consecutive majority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 Saskatchewan Roughriders 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 Saskatchewan Party 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 United States 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