Last day of session looms for MLAs not running in upcoming election

With the next provincial election just months away, some MLAs will be taking their seats in the assembly for the final time on Thursday.

Some have chosen not to go back. Thirteen Saskatchewan Party MLAs and two NDP MLAs won’t be running again. The names include four long-serving lawmakers who hold much of the party’s experience in their hands.

Donna Harpauer

Donna Harpauer said she’s been keeping too busy to spend much time dwelling on her impending departure from politics.

“I’ve just made my mind up that I’m going to work flat out until the last day, and then it’s probably going to hit me,” she said.

Harpauer, who was first elected in 1999, said she’s ready to be done.

“It’s time now. I have my latest, newest granddaughter, and so I’m looking forward to a little more family time with my grandkids,” she said.

Harpauer spent some time in opposition before heading into government and taking on a series of high-profile roles, including two of the “big three” portfolios, social services and education.

Harpauer has spent the last seven years as finance minister, presenting the government’s budget every spring.

She was finance minister when the government put out its 2017-‘18 budget, which pushed a number of cuts and closed the Saskatchewan Transportation Company. Harpauer said she still gets flak for that budget.

Harpauer said to her, the stand-out moment in her career was when social services designed and introduced the Saskatchewan Assured Income for Disability (SAID) program.

“I will never forget the day it was announced, and there were so many tears in the room,” she said, explaining that the disability groups who lobbied for it captured her heart.

Any political life as long as Harpauer’s will likely include some controversies. The latest for Harpauer was an $8,000 plane trip she took from Regina to North Battleford where she spoke at a chamber event. Harpauer said there were supposed to be other members on the plane, which would have defrayed the cost, but they ended up driving instead.

With 25 years of politics under her belt, Harpauer said she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to completely cut it off.

“I think I probably will follow Question Period for a while, and still stay plugged into the news and what’s happening,” she said.

Don McMorris

Don McMorris is also bowing out of political life after 25 years. He said he still has MLA and ministerial commitments through the summer, so it might not really feel like things are over until the fall sitting starts and he’s not in the legislature.

“I think the first step is when premier names cabinet after the next election, and you know your name’s not going to be there,” said McMorris.

“There’ll be lots of emotion, and I think that’s when it’ll hit me, far more than when I walk out of here on Thursday,”

In his time as an MLA, McMorris has also held a number of cabinet portfolios. He said health was the most challenging, but also the most gratifying.

“I remember when Premier Wall said ‘I think we should probably move you on.’ I felt that I should be moved on too, but I didn’t want to because it’s a portfolio (where) you have the most impact on people’s lives,” he explained.

Asked about highlights, he talked about putting up the doctor recruitment agency, changing how doctors are evaluated in Saskatchewan, and doubling training seats while building more long-term care homes.

McMorris is not without his scandals. In 2016 he pleaded guilty to an impaired driving charge. He said at the time that he’d been drinking with a friend the night before he was pulled over.

When he looks back on the charge now McMorris said he feels regret, but added that there were a lot of positives that came out of it.

“I can’t tell you how many people phoned with support, like unbelievable, from across the province, but definitely in the constituency, and then to run in the next election and receive a bigger plurality than I did the previous one, that meant a lot,” he said.

“The other thing I didn’t expect to come from it is the amount of people that (said) ‘Man, if it happened to you, it could happen to me, and I’ve changed what I’m doing.’”

McMorris said he thinks he’s going to have to do something new after getting out of politics, but first he’s going to take some time to decompress.

Don Morgan

With the countdown running, Don Morgan is looking forward to being done.

He’s been in politics for about 21 years, and worked in law for years before that. Morgan said he’s ready to travel more, and possibly take some university classes.

Morgan said he’s most proud of the work he did on Indigenous relations. He said he didn’t set out to make it a focal point, but it ended up that way, partly through his friendship with Chief Darcy Bear of the Whitecap Dakota First Nation.

“Working with First Nations, I think, is absolutely critical to the future of the province, and I think some of the things I’ve done have made fairly significant difference, or at least started us on the way down those paths,” said Morgan.

While Morgan didn’t offer specifics about what could have been done better in his career, he said hindsight makes him wonder about the court challenge against the federal carbon tax.

He said timing the challenge in a different way might have indicated more clearly that the issue was political, rather than legal. Morgan said the federal government giving relief on the carbon tax for home heating oil now shows it’s political.

“Maybe we should have gone the political route and been nastier earlier. I question the tactics that we were using, and I was directing them,” he said.

Morgan is a well-known prankster in the legislature. He once installed a three-foot high picture of his face in Premier Brad Wall’s bathroom and replaced Ken Cheveldayoff’s office furniture with tin tables and chairs.

“It was a hoot,” he said.

Dustin Duncan

While Dustin Duncan is on the younger side of the Sask. Party caucus, the 45-year-old MLA has 18 years of experience in politics. He was elected at the young age of 26 and has kept his seat ever since, cycling through different portfolios in cabinet.

Duncan said he’s leaving the job partly because he’s accomplished the three goals he had for his constituency when he started: a new hospital for Weyburn, a new health centre in Radville, and twinning Highway 39.

But he also has three kids, and as they get older, Duncan said they’re getting involved in their own activities.

“That’s meant a lot more juggling of my schedule, because I want to be there, and you only get this time in their life once,” said Duncan.

So far, he said his kids think his job is pretty cool, and they haven’t been exposed to the more difficult side of politics yet.

“There’s lots of difficult days in this job,” he said.

“There’s lots of difficult stories in the media that they don’t really pay attention to, that they don’t really understand, and we wanted to, and certainly I wanted to … in a sense protect them having really good memories about this time of our life, and maybe kind of shielding them from the negative stuff that comes with being a politician.”

Duncan was the education minister when the controversial pronoun policy was introduced last year, which resulted in a lot of frustration from opponents. But he said neither the policy nor the blowback played a part in his decision to depart from politics.

While he might be leaving now, Duncan said being an MLA was the culmination of a dream he’d had since he was a kid.

“I can literally say that I’ve wanted to do this job since I was about 10 years old,” said Duncan.

The next provincial election must be held by October 28.