Mandryk: Problems facing Moe in 2025 may be all too familiar to him

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Depending on your expectations and point of view, 2024 was either a rather bountiful year or a disappointing one for Premier Scott Moe and the Saskatchewan Party.

The good part was winning a fifth consecutive majority government at a time when incumbent administrations throughout the democratic world were falling like bowling pins.

The bad part is that while the rural stronghold remained solid, the Sask. Party was all but wiped out in the two major cities, losing five cabinet ministers (in addition to stalwarts who had previously announced retirement).

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This now makes for a lonely 2025 for Moe.

Moreover, the election result was a bit of an indictment of his increasingly social conservative agenda that brought the province Bill 137, the pronoun bill, and the mid-2024 campaign pledge to make policing school change rooms his No. 1 priority.

Of course, what’s past is past, and 2025 is truly a chance to start anew.

That means sticking your nose to the grindstone and rededicating yourself to resolving problems in health, education, social services and the economy you couldn’t resolve in 2024 …

Put that way, the new year may be less fun than it seems — especially considering that what awaits Moe in 2025 are many of the same old problems of 2024, with less economic or political capacity to address them.

There still are valid reasons for Moe to be optimistic.

In 2025, he is all but guaranteed an ally in Ottawa when Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre dispenses with Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the dreaded carbon tax.

Those unhappy to soon be losing their federal carbon tax rebate are far less of a political worry to Moe than the many others who will be dancing around the gas pumps.

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This will feel like as much of a victory for Moe as it will for Poilievre.

Combined with the measures in the Affordability Act that the Sask. Party ran on during the October general election campaign, perhaps Moe will be able to capitalize on what might be an improved situation throughout the country and the province.

But the big problems for him in the coming year will be some age-old Saskatchewan problems … now running headlong into some new ones.

The first ones may be in agriculture, although higher-than-normal recent snow cover might set the stage for both a better crop and lower forest firefighting costs.

If so, this will help with the planning of increasingly tight Saskatchewan budgets.

Unfortunately, nobody can predict what the crop year will produce … although there is almost an annual certainty that we’ll pay out more in crop insurance than expected.

Crop insurance has become one of those “same-old problems” in Saskatchewan. And continuing to offer tax breaks to bigger and more lucrative farms, increasingly owned by out-of-province interests, became one of those simmering issues in 2024.

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What’s more certain is that Saskatchewan agriculture is on a collusion course with U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s threatened 25 per cent tariffs. The same goes for Saskatchewan’s other major resource-based exports, including natural gas, oil and potash.

Many are expecting oil prices (the West Texas Intermediate price was around US$72 a barrel on New Year’s Eve) to fall. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s closer ties to Vladimir Putin only stand to benefit potash produced in Russia and Belarus. And all this is happening when the Canadian dollar is worth only 69 cents of a U.S. buck.

It will be difficult for Canadian conservatives like Moe and Poilievre, more politically aligned with the U.S. Republicans, to distance themselves from Trump’s rhetoric about making America great again … or making Canada the 51st state.

But even if the economy is good and the problems Trump might create aren’t as bad as feared, there are still the largely unresolved 2024 struggles in health, education and social programs.

The fundamentals of job and population growth are likely to remain sound in 2025, but this reality only adds to Moe’s challenge of refocussing on service delivery.

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And, by the end of 2025, he won’t have Trudeau around to blame if he doesn’t deliver.

Mandryk is a political columnist for the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.

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