Lon Borgerson will run for the provincial NDP in the Batoche riding in next year's election.(submitted Lon Borgerson)

By Glenn Hicks

2020 election

Lon Borgerson to run in Batoche riding

Oct 28, 2019 | 8:15 AM

It’s straight from the federal campaign into the provincial political fray for local New Democrat Lon Borgerson.

The former Saskatchewan Rivers MLA from 2003-2007 had just finished helping the campaign of federal candidate Harmony Johnson-Harder and has now secured the NDP nomination for the Batoche riding for next year’s provincial election. He was the only candidate. Batoche covers areas like Birch Hills, Wakaw, St. Louis and Duck Lake.

MacDowall-based Borgerson, previously the director of education for the Ile-à-la-Crosse school division and a former educator with the SUNTEP program, is retired. That background gives him a thorough understanding of what he says are the frustrations teachers have with the education system under the Sask Party government.

“What I see now concerns me greatly,” he told paNOW. “I meet teachers who are having second thoughts about continuing on in the profession because of cuts to education.”

Borgerson said special services for students have been impacted and over-crowded classrooms have taken their toll on the amount of attention teachers can give a student.

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He says he will also campaign on the challenges facing healthcare like the need for citizens to have regular access to a family doctor and to work on reducing wait times for important treatment.

But it’s what he sees as the government’s denial of climate change that is perhaps his most important reason for seeking the seat. He said people were waiting for governments to do their job in combatting climate change, the big polluters weren’t paying enough, and even as Canadians paid a carbon tax the federal government was still giving huge subsidies to the oil and gas industry. He added he was beginning to think the Sask Party believed there was no climate crisis.

“That young woman, Greta Thunberg, who is leading [climate] rallies around the world, I admire what she’s doing,” Borgerson said. “If we don’t as governments do something to seriously address climate change then as she would put it, ‘shame on us’. I think the Sask Party is in climate change denial denial.”

The Batoche riding has been held for the last four terms by the Sask Party’s Delbert Kirsch.

glenn.hicks@jpbg.ca

On Twitter:@princealbertnow