As election looms, Moe reflects on what brought him into politics

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SHELLBROOK — This hockey rink means a lot to Scott Moe.

A banner from a 1991 championship that Moe helped bring home used to hang from the rafters at the Richardson Pioneer Recreation Centre in Shellbrook, before the renovations.

“This is one of the few places where I’m never called premier,” said Moe, 51, who was the oldest of five kids growing up on a farm near Shellbrook.

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“I grew up in the arena,” he said. “I watched my kids grow up in the arena.”

Appropriately, since Moe cheers for the Edmonton Oilers and is a booster for the oil and gas industry, he played on a local team called the Oil Kings back in those days.

“This was everything to a kid,” said Moe, sitting in his hometown rink. “This is where the community came.”

Finding your place on a team, competing, showing what you can do — those are all elements of what continues to make the place important to him.

If you ask a straightforward question about his politics, you likely won’t get a straightforward answer. But, he feels the province — or at least enough of it to get him elected premier for the second time — sits in the centre to centre-right range.

Moe also mentions the importance of relationships, describing one of his strengths as “bringing people together to get things done.”

That’s part of why he likes this rink.

On a day in late September, he made a point of showing it off to visiting reporters, videographers and photojournalists who made the trek to Shellbrook for sit-down interviews. Moe thinks highly of the community that first built the rink — people who felled trees from nearby groves and forests to construct rafters after processing the lumber at a nearby mill.

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When it’s suggested there might be something he admires about the politics and ethos of those who built the rink, he says: “Yeah, that would be fair. If you want it done, you’ve got to do it yourself.”

For a generation of Saskatchewan citizens who can vote for the first time this year, a Sask. Party government is all they have ever seen. Back when Moe was 18, he was building houses in the Northwest Territories.

“I didn’t understand why I was there,” he said, “but I understood that I could make a lot more money there than I could in Saskatchewan.”

Before politics, Moe sold agriculture equipment and owned gas stations. He and his wife now co-own a pharmacy. The two married in the early 1990s and have two children — Carter and Taryn.

It was in the early 2000s when he first started paying attention to politics. At the time, he and his wife Krista were living in Vermilion, Alta., where his constituency’s MLA was Alberta’s finance minister.

The couple moved back to Shellbrook in 2003 and four years later he got involved in Saskatchewan politics as a volunteer. He watched the Sask. Party form government in 2007 and was elected four years later as an MLA in Rosthern-Shellbrook.

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Moe was then appointed to cabinet as the environment minister in 2014. Years later as premier, Moe would be front and centre of today’s ongoing fight with Ottawa over the carbon tax, rife with court cases and controversy.

But Moe is no stranger to controversy. When he first ran for leadership of the party in 2018, news broke that back in 1992, he was convicted of impaired driving.

Then during the 2020 election, it came to light that in 1997, Moe was the driver of a vehicle that crashed into a car after not stopping at a highway intersection. The other driver, Jo-Anne Balog, was killed in the collision. In 2020, Moe apologized to her son, who was a passenger when the crash occurred.

This election, the Sask. Party is fielding a team that has fewer veterans, with 34 of 61 candidates seeking office for the first time. Moe said this offers a chance for the party to evolve, a party which has governed for 17 years. But with that comes a loss of experience, including those who sat as members of the Opposition before the party first formed government.

“That concerns me because we have not very many, if one maybe, person that has served in opposition after this — this next election,” Moe said, adding that he’s “pretty excited, actually, at the opportunity for renewal within our party.”

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Moe has been with the Sask. Party since 2011, becoming leader in 2018 after Brad Wall stepped down as premier midway through his third term. What his future looks like is something Moe tends to structure four years at a time.

“There’s two ways people leave politics, one is you leave or two you get punted,” he said. “I would hope that I’m able to find my way to the former.”

As the Saskatchewan United Party fields candidates in a few dozen constituencies, Moe has not shied away from his concern about vote splitting this year.

“We saw that most recently in Alberta in 2015,” he said.

But despite Moe’s stated ability to bring people together, his party has found ways to drive some away. He went from being the first Saskatchewan premier to walk in a pride parade to passing the Parents’ Bill of Rights through the notwithstanding clause last year, an action that resulted in his party being banned from pride parades.

Moe was asked what leadership means to him. Should it reflect the blowing winds of voters or is it about standing for something in the face of public pushback?

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“I think governments are always there to reflect the beliefs and wishes of the majority of the people that they represent,” he said. “That is precisely what we try to do.”

alsalloum@postmedia.com

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