Saskatchewan NDP Already Making Excuses For Losing

Orange getting ready to be crushed in SK

In Becoming Holyfield, multi-time World Heavyweight Champion Evander Holyfield offers an intriguing insight into the behaviours of boxers who know they cannot win a big match:

They give themselves an excuse to win.

Holyfield even attributed the infamous ear-biting incident to this particular behaviour: Mike Tyson giving himself an excuse for having lost.

With pre-election polls in Saskatchewan indicating that, barring a miracle, serious gaffe, or major political scandal, the Saskatchewan Party will win a dominating victory in the coming 2011 provincial election, the NDP is already looking for it's excuse for losing.

Regina-Dewdney MLA Kevin Yates has decided on his excuse: blame attack ads from the Saskatchewan Party undermining NDP leader Dwain Lingenfelter.

“This is how the right-wing does things," Yates complained. "I don’t think it would have mattered who the leader is, they would have gone after the leader. The tactics might have been a little different but that’s what they do."

Yates complained that the ads were unfair. He's obviously banking on voters forgetting about the deliberately deceptive attack ads the NDP has been running, featuring fabricated quotes cast ridiculously out of context. How Yates says the right-wing does things is not all that different from how the left-wing does things.

Other than Yates, other NDP candidates and activists seem to be quietly admitting defeat, and focusing on making it as small a defeat as they can.

Saskatoon-Nutana MLA Pat Atkinson will not run in the 2011 election. This grants her a great deal of freedom to speak openly about the NDP's prospects in the coming election.

“There is no question we are in a battle to maintain the seats that we have. But I think it’s important that the NDP do well enough so that the government has an Opposition that can be effective,” said Atkinson, formerly Minister of Finance. “It appears as though Brad Wall is going to be re-elected ...we usually give a government two terms. The important thing will be to have an effective Opposition.”

(Noting that Saskatchewan often gives governments at least two terms seems to smack of another excuse, even if it seems more gracious.)

“Brad Wall is a very popular guy," Atkinson conceded. "There’s no question about that. But does that mean you give him a mandate to do whatever he wants? I don’t think the public wants to do that.”

There is little question that Saskatchewan would be better off with a strong opposition than a weak one. But with the NDP pulling some boneheaded blunders and seemingly conceding the election, they'll have great difficulty electing that kind of opposition.

Brad Wall will continue to be a great Premier of Saskatchewan -- far better than Dwain Lingenfelter could hope to be -- the NDP is already doing enough to ensure that.