COVID-19 dominates, disrupts, in trying year for Premier Scott Moe

As the head of the province, Premier Scott Moe has been at the forefront of Saskatchewan’s COVID response, but he says that wasn’t anywhere near the front of his mind a year ago.

“There’s absolutely no way for anyone to predict, ultimately, how this year turned out,” said Moe.

Moe said if he could speak to himself a year ago he wouldn’t be giving game results or lottery numbers, he would be practical.

“I would have said, ‘Order a bunch of PPE and pre-order a bunch of vaccine or dump $50 million into VIDO-InterVac immediately. Don’t wait two or three months,’ ” Moe said.

Looking back, Moe said there isn’t anything he would do differently, although he acknowledged that in the spring, the province shut schools down while keeping them open this fall.

“(It’s a) different decision than we made in the spring, but given what we knew at that point in time and the time constraints that we had, I don’t know that we could have changed that decision at that point in time,” Moe said.

The impacts of the pandemic have been severe. People are isolated, some have lost jobs, there have been effects on people’s mental health, addictions issues, and in some cases, people have lost loved ones.

Moe said as premier, that’s hard to watch.

“This is not a grand moment for leaders of any level of government,” he said. “This is a challenging moment for all people, including those that are in leadership positions.”

Moe said he leans on his fellow premiers and they’ll share notes and try to help each other on what works and what doesn’t.

There are some less obvious effects of the pandemic. Moe pointed to rising surgical wait times as an example, and as something that will have to be addressed when the pandemic is over.

“That is going to require funding and it’s going to require a plan on how we are going to not only get our surgical capacity back to where it was pre-COVID but to start to chip away at what will be a fairly significant wait time,” he said.

Moe focused a lot on getting the province to recover after the pandemic, being in the best possible position at that time to recover and grow. He said that’s one of the main prongs of the province’s response to COVID along with limiting community spread and deaths.

It wasn’t all bad in 2020 for Moe. The fall election was a highlight for him. He won another majority government for his party, his first as leader.

“It is an honour and it is very humbling to be provided with the mandate that we have and the majority government that we have to govern this province over the course of the next four years,” said Moe.

He said that win was one of two gifts the people of Saskatchewan gave him in 2020. The second is the grit and resilience they’ve shown in responding to the pandemic and in helping to reduce the spread of the virus and following public health orders.