Election postmortem: Sask. not immune to ‘NDP collapse’

WATCH: Saskatchewan voters delivered a historic verdict in the federal election, shifting support from the NDP to the Liberals.

An historic federal election produced some historic results in Saskatoon.

With plenty of discourse leading into Monday’s election dominated by Canada’s relationship with the United States and President Donald Trump’s tariff threats, voters appeared to favour the Liberals and Conservatives as support for the New Democrats dwindled.

“I think the story in Saskatchewan is very much similar story nationally: a number of things went wrong for the NDP, but probably the most remarkable is that we ended up with an election that was about ‘who do you want to deal with Donald Trump?’” University of Saskatchewan political studies assistant professor Daniel Wesltake said.

“We’ve seen this return to a near two-party system for the first time in ages,” Loleen Berdahl, the executive director of the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, said.

“Parties getting over 40 per cent of the popular vote. We haven’t had that in ages, and yet they’re still not forming a majority. Both parties doing better than expected, and at the same time, worse than expected.”

Westlake and Berdahl were part of a federal election post-mortem Tuesday at the University of Saskatchewan to unravel all the major storylines from Monday’s results.

The Liberals and Conservatives were both able to garner more than 40 per cent of the popular vote — 42 per cent and 49 per cent, respectively. Neither party had done so in decades. The last time two parties did so in one election was when Conservative R.B. Bennett became Prime Minister in 1930.

That left the NDP with very little support.

“The role of the NDP has really diminished in our province as well as everywhere else,” Berdahl said.

In Saskatoon, the three Conservative incumbents held on to their seats.

Brad Redekopp captured Saskatoon West again, with 52.5 per cent of the vote. Corey Tochor will return to Ottawa in Saskatoon University, netting nearly 48.9 per cent, or 23,178 votes; and Kevin Waugh earned a victory in Saskatoon South with 24,516 votes.

In all three ridings, the Liberals replaced the NDP as runner-up, in a departure from the last three elections — and sometimes by a wide margin.

In both Saskatoon South and Saskatoon University, Liberal candidates Rokhan Sarwar and Greg Poelzer received more than 40 per cent of votes, with the NDP’s Jacob Gadzella and Melissa McGillivray earning less than ten per cent each.

In Saskatoon West, a riding that elected the NDP’s Sheri Benson in 2015 before turning over to Redekopp, the NDP had trailed by margins of under 3,000 votes in the previous few elections.

On Monday, the NDP’s Rachel Loewen Walker saw that margin increase to over 12,000 votes, and nearly 3,000 votes behind the Liberals’ Chad Eggerman.

“You get a lot of these NDP voters would normally be sympathetic to the NDP moving over to the Liberals,” Westlake said.

“The NDP collapse did not have any shield in Saskatchewan,” Berdahl said.

As the Conservatives form one of the strongest oppositions to a minority government in recent memory, all three Saskatoon area members of parliament spoke of their urgency to trigger a non-confidence vote and get back to the polls to attempt to unseat a Liberal minority government once again.

“People are hungry for change, especially in our part of the country,” Saskatoon University MP Corey Tochor said.

“And I think of the people that are suffering. They’ve been suffering for a long time under, oppressive Liberal policies coming from Ottawa that has hurt our people.”

However, Berdahl isn’t so sure many would be willing to go back to the polls so soon.

“The question would be, ‘why would somebody want to trigger that?’” Berdahl said.

“I don’t know why we would want to, but we’ve done it before.”

-With files from Rory MacLean