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Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe was in the news for saying something stupid again last week, this time due to leaked footage from a town hall meeting in his rural farming constituency of Rosthern-Shellbrook where he did his best to answer barking mad questions from the audience.
Moe was asked by a concerned citizen about what the provincial government plans to do about the sinister “chemtrails” left by commercial airliners, presumably on the orders of George Soros and/or the Biden Crime Family, in order to turn people gay or into Wi-Fi hotspots or whatever the flavor of crazy du jour is. Possibly trick them into voting for Justin Trudeau or buying Taylor Swift albums.
“Can’t someone else do it?” Moe responded. Lol. Just kidding. That line actually came from Moe the bartender in an old episode of “The Simpsons” where Homer adopted it as a campaign slogan for a foray into populist politics where he successfully ran to replace Steve Martin as Springfield’s Sanitation Commissioner. (Hilarity ensued.)
What Premier Moe actually said in response was:
“I am starting to hear about this through emails into our office the last number of months and I, honestly, I’ll have to do some more work looking into it. … I don’t know if there is as co-ordinated an approach as some folks think, but obviously there are emissions that are coming out of the jets that are flying over and the prospect is, or the projection is, there is going to be a lot more jets flying in the not too distant future than there is today.”
So basically Moe said he is going to do his own research before making any major policy announcements. Possibly after first conferring with Larry and Curly. The last time Yr Wonkette wrote about Canada’s only rectangular province was because Elon Musk was showering it with deadly space junk, but evidently some residents are more concerned about imaginary threats from above.
If unfamiliar with the chemtrails conspiracy, it’s about fears the tinfoil hat community have about the puffy white lines sometimes left behind by planes. Contrails are caused when water vapor and soot particulates from burning jet fuel freeze into ice crystals. They generally evaporate in low air humidity but, when the humidity is higher, they don’t and so create the visible wakes in the sky similar to the lines left by the fancy bikes from Tron.
The fever dream that shadowy forces are regularly dousing the planet with bioweapons first took hold in the ‘90s and, like many enduring conspiracy theories, contains a particle of truth. Back in the mid-20th century, parts of Britain actually were sprayed with airborne chemicals in secret germ warfare tests by the Ministry of Defense to see what might happen if the Soviets deployed chemical weapons against the island.
The UK government finally came clean in 2002 with a report detailing their covert Cold War-era callousness towards public safety. As the Guardian reported at the time:
One chapter of the report, “The Fluorescent Particle Trials,” reveals how between 1955 and 1963 planes flew from north-east England to the tip of Cornwall along the south and west coasts, dropping huge amounts of zinc cadmium sulphide on the population. The chemical drifted miles inland, its fluorescence allowing the spread to be monitored. In another trial using zinc cadmium sulphide, a generator was towed along a road near Frome in Somerset where it spewed the chemical for an hour.
While the Government has insisted the chemical is safe, cadmium is recognised as a cause of lung cancer and during the Second World War was considered by the Allies as a chemical weapon.
Not a good look for 007’s employer but militaries pulled all kinds of crazy shit back then. The US Navy even conscripted dolphins! It’s unclear if Moe believes airplane exhaust emissions are something actually worth investigating but my money is on the Hank Hill doppleganger simply pandering to his base, which tends to be Moe’s modus operandi.
Saskatchewan isn’t what anyone would describe as a progressive part of the country. The province is so flat it’s almost understandable it’s produced so many Flat Earth types. The Conservative Party of Canada won every seat there in the last federal election, and that’s before they jettisoned their relatively moderate leader, Erin O’Toole, in favor of the unapologetically vicious Pierre Poilievre.
Moe’s Saskatchewan Party won a majority in the last provincial election four years ago, with 48 out of an available 61 seats to the lefty NDP’s 13, but they’re no doubt worried about potential vote-splitting with emerging lunatic Right parties in the upcoming fall election.
The Buffalo Party, for example, formed in 2020 out of frustration over pandemic restrictions in a province that had the most lax rules in the country. The upstart fringe party nonetheless managed to win 2.5 percent of the popular vote despite only running 17 candidates.
Not to be confused with the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes of “Flintstones” fame, the party took its name from the prairie province’s abundance of American bison, which was 52,860 at last count, or 52,856 more than they currently have at the zoo in Buffalo, New York. The irony is likely lost on them the word is also a euphemism for bullying.
(Side note/fun fact: The longest sentence in English using only one word is “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” Swap in bison and capitalize the word to represent the lakeside city in upstate New York and you’ve got “Bison from New York, whom other New York bison bully, bully other bison from New York.”)
And now there’s the new Saskatchewan United Party, which formed two years ago after MLA Nadine Wilson was either booted from caucus for lying about her vaccination status or resigned on principle to escape the tyranny of Scott Moe, depending on whom you talk to. But expecting low-information voters to differentiate between the far-right Saskatchewan Party and the far-right Saskatchewan United Party is a roll of the dice.
Just ask a member of the People’s Front of Judea or the Judean People’s Front.
Moe added more fuel to the fire at the same town hall by also promising to “look into” suggestions from the crowd the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) were out to get them, which drew the immediate ire of NDP leader Carla Beck.
“It shouldn’t have been difficult for the premier to simply say, ‘You know what? That’s not the case. Saskatchewan health-care workers and the SHA were not involved in poisoning the population,’” she told the Regina Leader Post.
But the funniest part about this whole mess is it seems to have created a dumb new controversy of its own. Attempting to defuse the situation, the government put out a statement saying Moe “accepted an invitation from the Mayor to attend a town-hall meeting in Speers where he did just that, listening to and responding to constituents’ concerns on a number of different topics.”
But, according to the mayor of the village of Speers, Kenneth Rebeyka, no such RSVP was ever sent, and Moe was forced to admit it was an oopsie to say he’d been invited to speak.
Chances are Mayor Rebeyka and his family are fielding online death threats from engaged and enraged Saskatchewanians as you read this. A buffalo stance is essentially their M.O.
