“People are so distrusting of politicians and the political system as a whole. It’s getting very hard to try and find candidates and when you have seven parties, that makes it even harder.”
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Two Saskatchewan political parties are mulling over the possibility of a merger, alliance or coalition to field a full slate of candidates.
Leaders from the Saskatchewan Progressive Conservative Party and the Saskatchewan Buffalo Party confirmed on Wednesday there have been talks about combining forces before the election, but the details remain to be seen, with meetings coming up prior to the writ drop.
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PC Leader Rose Buscholl said “there has been a discussion, yes. However, we are doing our due diligence before a final decision is made.”
Buscholl said getting people to run for a political party is hard, so this option was explored as a possibility to determine whether the two parties could field 61 candidates by combining forces for the election, which is set to take place on or before Oct. 28.
“People are so distrusting of politicians and the political system as a whole. It’s getting very hard to try and find candidates and when you have seven parties, that makes it even harder,” said Buscholl.
Buscholl said the ideological differences between the parties has to be discussed between the two camps.
“We’ve got to make sure that, politically, we align.”
Buffalo Party Leader Phillip Zajac also confirmed the talks were underway.
“We’re trying to see if there’s some mutual ground,” he said on Wednesday. “I’m not really sure how it’s going to look; that’s why we’ve got meetings coming up.”
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Zajac said the main reason he is seeking to enter an agreement is that there is overlap between the two parties and their messages, policies and platforms.
“As a party we’re always willing to talk and listen to new ideas and this is an opportunity to do that,” he said. The PCs have experience and infrastructure that a new party like Zajac’s could learn from, he said.
While there is an effort to try to consolidate a voting block, Buscholl said the Saskatchewan Party and the Saskatchewan United Party have made mention of vote splitting, but to her, no person’s vote is guaranteed.
“It’s pretty arrogant of these parties to assume that your vote already belongs to them. Vote splitting is not a thing; when it comes to elections it is the people that are going to decide,” she said.
In the 2020 general election, the Buffalo Party received 11,298 votes or 2.54 per cent of the total vote share; the PCs had 8,404 ballots cast in their favour, for 1.89 per cent of the total vote share.
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