When local MLA Greg Ottenbreit changed portfolios in cabinet in August, I found it fairly surprising the way it was spun. More was made of him no longer being the Minister of Rural and Remote Health than the focus on his new position, Minister of Highways and Infrastructure. In reality, his new position should have been the focus of everyone’s attention.
Ottenbreit is now, quite literally, at the center of a major highways project, adding passing lanes to the highways both to Canora and Melville. Voters in Yorkton will be running into a highways project if they go north, or if they go south. While the plans for the project began before he got the portfolio, the Yorkton MLA is now inevitably going to be associated with it. He’s the minister of this exact thing, and everyone in the area is going to know about it.
The election is likely to be held in early November next year. The projected completion date of the passing lanes is October. The cabinet minister in charge of the exact project is square in the middle, and he has a lot of incentive to make the project go smoothly. While voters can forget things from earlier in a term, they don’t tend to forget things they saw that very morning, and whether it’s construction overruns or a nice drive are going to be fresh in people’s minds as they head to the ballot box.
While I had found this curious for the past few months, I was reminded of this recently when an information meeting was held to discuss the impending project, which is going to take up most of 2020 and end before the election itself. Naturally, election or no election, the government wants this project done before the end of October – construction starts to get much more difficult when snow shows up – and the Minister in charge of it is going to be pushed to ensure it gets done before then whether there’s an election right at the end or not. There’s also only so much they can do, being that they are mere politicians, and thus can neither control the weather or actually do the construction work.
However, by putting the Minister right in the middle of the project, it’s a way to keep it on track. He’s now going to be associated with the project in the minds of voters, which adds pressure to do what’s in his power to keep it moving. If anything goes wrong, he’s the guy who gets blamed in the end, and given that is happening right before an election, that’s going to be fresh in the minds of local voters.
Which is pressure for Ottenbreit, of course, and he’s going to be very closely tied to this specific project for the next year. It’s not the only duty he will have nor is it the only major project that the ministry will face, but it is going to be the one that matters most to voters who he wants to impress. That’s much more interesting to me than the portfolio he left, the one he is taking on is going to have some very specific pressure.
