Whether you admire what Liberal leader Ryan Bater is attempting to do may largely depend on your perspective.
On one hand, his commitment to winning The Battlefords seats on Nov. 7 provincial election might seem commendable.
Bater ran a distant third in the riding in 2007. However, Bater's 1,300 votes were enough to split the vote with the Saskatchewan Party and allow the NDP's Len Taylor to become the NDP's only win in a rural seat.
In 2011, he's taking another run at The Battlefords. And in doing so, he seems fully prepared to sacrifice Liberal fortunes elsewhere.
It's about seven weeks before the provincial election campaign and there are no Liberal candidates nominated to run. Bater said in a recent interview there will be other Liberals running _ perhaps as many as 30, 40 or 50. However, he says we would also be content to field as few as 15 Liberal candidates, meaning that the Liberals, for the first time, will be running under the admission that the party will not form government.
Bater admits that he deliberately intends to run a very different campaign with no such pretence of forming government. There will no Liberal bus criss-crossing the province before the Nov. 7 vote. In fact, Bater admits that he won't likely stray very far from The Battlefords because his main goal is to win that seat.
"We're focused on winning a seat, period," Bater said, arguing the Liberals have no credibility until they get a seat in the legislature and that The Battlefords, the last seat in Saskatchewan held by a Liberal, is the best change for that.
In a way, his single-minded dedication to that goal, and to the riding, may be seen as admirable. Bater, a former economic development officer, said he stuck to North Battleford when virtually all his friends were moving to Alberta.
And after years of watching Liberal leaders put up what were essentially phoney campaigns that had no real hope of winning anything, there is something refreshing about Bater's frankness.
But whether you belief Bater's decision is wise or unwise, of less debate than it is a decision that may have a profound effect on Saskatchewan politics.
There's always been a lot of talk in Saskatchewan political circles about how Liberals splitting votes with Conservatives always allowed NDP victories in Saskatchewan. If you peruse the results, you actually see that there isn't much evidence of where that has been the case. The most concrete examples are in 1975 and 1999 when the NDP formed government will less than 40 per cent, meaning that there was a true vote split.
However, there are plenty of examples where that third party vote, usually Liberal vote,has often prevented landslide wins. That was clearly the case in 2007 when the Liberals' 9.4 per cent of the popular vote played a role in limiting the Saskatchewan Party to just 38 of the 58 seats, even though it got 51 per cent of the popular vote.
Bater's strategy of focussing on The Battlefords and not running Liberal candidates in all ridings where they would likely take votes away from the Sask. Party could have a big impact on this election. In fact, combined with the fact that Premier Brad Wall's government is riding high at around 58 per cent in the polls, almost 30 percentage points higher than Dwain Lingenfelter's NDP, it would now seem we are ripe for a Sask. Party landslide.
Whether Bater's decision produces a Liberal opposition member from The Battlefords in the legislature remains questionable.
But what it really might do is result in a lot less opposition members of any kind.
