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That it’s occasionally the tail wagging the dog is not always the worst thing in governance.

Government often sees excessive power concentrated in a premier’s office that’s surrounded by senior political operatives and civil servants, and distanced from backbenchers who should be most in-tune with voters’ concerns.

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This vital backbenchers’ job often goes unnoticed until the post-mortem of governments. Take the last NDP government that ended in 2007 — one heavily weighed down by urban MLAs with union connections who didn’t see what was coming. Like the previous NDP government of Allan Blakeney held captive by bureaucrats or professional political strategists until its 1982 demise, it did not have the backbench early warning system to alert them to the incoming conservative tsunami.

Admittedly, this hasn’t exactly been Scott Moe’s problem.

While Saskatchewan Party MLAs owed their success to Premier Brad Wall, Moe’s defeat of Alanna Koch (Wall’s deputy minister and also a longtime political operative) can largely be attributed to the22 caucus MLAs (17 of whom were rural) who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him when he made his Sask. Party leadership announcement in 2017.

From the beginning, Moe has always been one of the boys, which is fine … except when it starts to become evident that you’ve been hanging out with the boys too much. This may be the biggest problem for the Sask. Party government — one that is the antithesis of being held captive by intellectuals and urban bureaucrats, but which may be no less problematic in the long run.

For more than a week now, we have watched with puzzlement as Moe has balked at putting needed distance between himself and the Western separatism nonsense he should be condemning as he calls for a new deal with the federal Liberal minority government.