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Candidates adjusting to COVID-19 as election nears

There will be people all across Saskatchewan heading to polling stations on October 26 to vote for the MLA in their area.
Election pic

There will be people all across Saskatchewan heading to polling stations on October 26 to vote for the MLA in their area. The polling station will look different than most years, however, with the Covid-19 pandemic forcing Saskatchewan Chief Electoral Officer Dr. Michael Boda to implement health and safety protocols with the guidance of the Electoral Advisory Board — made up of Boda, Chief medical Health Officer Dr. Saqib Shahab, Government House Leader Jeremy Harrison, and Opposition House Leader Cathy Sproule.

Not only will the actual polling stations look different in 2020, but so will everything leading up to October 26. Most election years involve heavy campaigning in the community, with candidates getting out into their areas for everything from barbecues to going door to door. 

Campaigning is all about putting a face to the name and spreading a message on why residents of a community should trust a candidate to lead them. With Covid-19, though, it won’t be so simple. With most community events cancelled in the short-term and the unknown with the long-term, candidates will have to go about campaigning differently in 2020.

Sask Party only one to nominate so far

With the Sask Party the only party to have a candidate set in every electoral district in Southeast Saskatchewan, they’re preparing for a different kind of campaign this summer and fall. 

“Campaigning (for the fall election) has been going on for a long time,” said Sask Party Executive Director Patrick Bundrock. “So it’s not just about how it’s impacting us over the next few months, but it’s how is it impacting us now? I would say that after the Covid-19 pandemic really broke out and the government started to bring in their response to slow the spread of Covid-19, the party basically made the decision that it was best to stop all of our activities. 

“Then about a month ago we transitioned to the new form of campaigning. We’ve been doing lots of work on social media, emails, text messages, and of course we’ve been doing a lot of work on the phones. We’re not doing any in-person campaigning at this point, we’re waiting on (Saskatchewan Chief Medical Officer) Dr. Shahab to issue new guidelines. We’re following the guidelines as issued by the chief medical officer and not doing any physical campaigning right now.”

With nobody quite knowing what comes next with Covid-19 and when things truly will be normal again, Bundrock says, the Sask Party will be following the guidance of Dr. Shahab and continue with remote campaigning until further notice.

“We’re very closely following what the health department and Dr. Shahab does,” he said. “As the guidelines get posted and updated, we review them and determine from there what we’re going to do. For example, the last five nomination meetings that we have to do to finish off the party’s slate of nominations, we’re doing by mail-in ballot. The other thing we did was we decided that we couldn’t have Premier’s Dinners because obviously it would be a violation of the order. To be very cautious, we shifted a lot of our fundraising activities to mailings, to online, and to email.”

Bundrock says, like all other industries in the province, the Sask Party will adjust as more opens up as they move towards the fall elections. 

“The political parties are no different than any business in Saskatchewan,” he said. “Everybody has had to change and we’ve had to change as well. Every couple weeks the guidelines get updated and we go through them. As we move through the different parts of the reopen Saskatchewan plan, the government has put out, every phase of it different things change and you can do more so if Dr. Shahab says, ‘you can now do this’ then we’ll review it and be compliant with that.”