Regina’s three People’s Party of Canada candidates all intend to run as Progressive Conservatives in the next provincial election. Trevor Wowk, Mario Milanovski , and Tracey Sparrowhawk finished fifth in their respective federal ridings last October, but believe there’s nowhere to go but up as they enter provincial politics..“Going this route makes much more sense because this is an established party,” Sparrowhawk says. “We don’t have to bring it build it from the ground up, and there’s money available for the campaign…Plus it’s not as big a territory.”.The candidates will run in provincial ridings that are within their previous campaign areas. But the provincial ridings are smaller, since there are 14 federal seats in Saskatchewan but 61 in provincial elections. .Seeds for the partnership were sewn last July when Saskatchewan PC leader and paratransit driver Ken Grey came to a campaign event for Wowk..“I was almost chuckling out of my shoes the day Ken came to our barbeque because he was in full transit mode with his shorts and his safety vest and his walkie [talkie],” Wowk recalls. Grey agreed to offer PC volunteers to help PPC campaigns if the same would be reciprocated in the next provincial election..“Early January of this year just about as I was willing to push the send button on my text message to Ken to say we need to have coffee, he sent me a text message. And that’s where we started.”.Gray says the PPC is a good match for the provincial PC’s with its emphasis on immigration policy, balanced budgets, and less centralization for provinces within the Canadian federation. He believes the governing Saskatchewan Party’s growth target of 1.4 million people by 2030 relies on “irrational immigration numbers…at all costs.”. IMG_20200224_213213239 .“Many of the people that have come to us are disaffected Sask Party people who felt that the Sask Party was being more liberal, whether it was from a social conservative point of view or even an economic point of view,” Grey says. .The Saskatchewan Party formed in 1997 as a coalition of four Progressive Conservative MLAs and four Liberal MLAs. The PCs have not won a seat since, but the Sask Party won the 2007, 2011, and 2016 elections under the leadership of Brad Wall. In his final election, the party took 51 seats and the NDP, 10..Scott Moe replaced Wall as Saskatchewan Party leader and premier in 2018. The NDP and Liberal leaders have also been replaced, with a new Green leader to be chosen soon..Amidst these winds of change, Grey hopes his party will increase its vote count and win a seat or two..“The Sask Party has proven to be a very high-spending, high-taxing interventionist government. And I think a lot of conservatives took exception to that and are looking at us.”.The task before the PC Party is high. The Saskatchewan Party won the 2007, 2011, and 2016 elections under Brad Wall, taking 51 of 61 seats in his final effort..Both the Saskatchewan Party and the PCs could also face a potential new challenger on the right as the new WEXIT Saskatchewan Party drives for its registration in time for the fall vote. .The PC party only ran 18 candidates in the 2016 election and finished third in 10 of those. They collected 1.28 per cent of the provincial vote. Ken Grey finished third in the Regina Northeast by-election on September 24, 2018 with 2.8 per cent of the vote. Six weeks later he became the new PC leader..In the federal election, Wowk received 573 votes in Regina-Lewvan. Saskatchewan Party MLA Warren Steinley won federally as a Conservative, taking more than half of the 51,614 votes cast. .In recent weeks, Wowk invited former Regina-Wascana PPC candidate Mario Malinovsky to look at the platform. .“I read through it and I felt I was getting back into PPC”, said Milanovski . .Malinovski received 450 votes in Regina-Wascana, behind Liberal incumbent Ralph Goodale and Conservative Michael Kram, who won the seat..“At a lot of the doors [during the federal campaign] they said they loved the platform and everything, but they have to vote Conservative now to take Trudeau out,” Maliovski says. “So I will definitely go back to the same doors.”.Sparrowhawk received 513 votes in her run against Andrew Scheer in Regina Qu’Appelle..“It was good to get out there and talk to people and realize that a) there are a lot of people that a didn’t know who they were even going to vote for, b) they didn’t like Andrew Scheer,” Sparrowhawk says. “They were very open to hearing about the People’s Party platform.”.All three candidates attended a February 22 protest at Regina city hall calling for an end to illegal blockades. The blockades had run for days as a demonstration against pipelines, but on February 21, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for them to end..“He should have done that in the first place,” Milanovski told the CBC..Lee Harding is the Saskatchewan Affairs Columnist for the Western Standard
