Last thoughts on the cabinet shuffle

Probably the best way to look at Brad Wall’s recent cabinet shuffle (Government of Saskatchewan) is to put it in context of the NDP leadership race. Wall thinks (correctly,) that Dwain Lingenfelter is going to win in a walk, so Wall prepared a wartime cabinet.

That’s the main reason why Wall has removed three people (Sask. Party website) who (for Sask. Party politicians, anyway) were doing not that bad a job, and replaced them with three hard-core ideologues (Sask Party website). Wall is expecting that the next months in the Legislature will resemble trench warfare in the First World War – massive expenditures of manpower, time, money and effort for little or no gain.

Then again, I’m sure Wall would rather see Link as NDP leader than anybody else, for the same reason why the Pentagon would rather fight a conventional war than a war of counter-insurgency. It’s what they know; it’s what they think they’re good at.

As for the other factors? Surprised that former Regina city councilor Bill Hutchinson was dispatched to Indian and Métis Relations: in Wall’s philosophy, that’s a dead-end job. I didn’t think he was doing that bad in Municipal Affairs. Christine Tell was a low-level screwup at Tourism, Parks, Culture and Sport, so I was kind of surprised that she stayed in cabinet, instead of replacing her with say, Laura Ross. Daryl Hickie botched Corrections so badly that Wall should have grabbed him by his ears, stuck a handful of stamps to his keister and mail him home to his mama. His replacement (who thanks to spell-check and to the fact I won’t trust my eyesight totally until I get my new spectacles, I will refer to here as “The Yogic Flier”) campaigned in the late 1990s on bring in boot camps, so the Sask. Party’s knuckle-dragging camp won’t be totally dissatisfied by Wall’s increasingly metro-sexual dress up façade.

But Saskatchewan’s political power base has shifted: the further you get away from Swift Current, the further you’re getting away from power. As well, The Jurist (Accidental Deliberations) has a good analysis about what the shuffle means for Wall’s campaign for a SaskaNuke.

(Yes, I know. It's late. And conflict between MS Word and Internet Explorer that refused to allow me to cut-and-paste from Wod really frost my buns, kids ...)