The NDP candidate in the Estevan Constituency said his party will probably take the message they received on Monday night to heart and begin working on party programs they feel will work in the future.
Blair Schoenfeld said the voting results in the local riding didn't surprise him at all. He had a sense that the electorate was satisfied with status quo shortly after he won his party's nomination over a year ago and started unofficially campaigning.
"The people said they felt they were satisfied and I took that as an indicator of things to come. But on the bright side, I found campaigning to be a wonderful experience and the highlights were going around and meeting some very good people," Schoenfeld said on Monday night as the early poll tabulations showed he was going to be swamped by supporters of incumbent candidate Doreen Eagles and was barely going to break through the 1,000 vote barrier.
"There was a lot of representation out there for her and we just didn't do all that well. I don't know that even if we had more money to spend on the campaign, if we would have done any better."
Schoenfeld said he would gladly represent the New Democrats again on the hustings, "but I'd like to do it under better circumstances," he said with a laugh.
"You know the seated MLAs have an advantage. They have time to campaign because they're officially off the job while all the others still have their regular jobs to do. That can make it tough."
Schoenfeld said he expected his party will now do a lot of assessment work and will probably reach out to the youth in the party and in the province to help them rejuvenate.
"We need to recruit some new blood and I believe we can because there is still a sense of apathy towards government in general in this province that needs to be addressed."
As he exits the political scene, at least for now, Schoenfeld said he still felt strongly about a couple of issues in the Estevan Constituency that will keep nagging at him and should keep nagging at the general populace until they see some results.
"Somebody is going to have to address affordable housing. It is a problem here and it's a real problem in Estevan. Somebody is going to have to do something soon," he said.
"The other major issue I see around here is the Highway 39 twinning. It simply has to be done. The danger is something that will take more than a few passing lanes to correct and any other advice I would leave behind would be the need for this area and this province to focus a lot more on manufacturing and finishing products instead of shipping all our raw resources out of province. All we're doing is extracting. We need to keep more of that money in our constituency and not just keep on sending it out of here. We could start by building more homes," he said.
Schoenfeld said there will be time to select new leadership for the NDP in the wake of Dwain Lingenfelter's stepping down as the head man. He added that he didn't have a sense of a groundswell of support for any given leadership hopeful at this early stage.
"It's time instead for a total assessment of the party as to what went wrong and then we need to take one step forward and one step at a time."
Schoenfeld concluded by stating that he appreciated the fact that the local campaign was "a decent one" with a minimum amount of negativity shown by the candidates all the way through."
