Lingenfelter and Wall: Resource development is the big issue in Monday's electionThe Canadian Press
Canada's epidemic of provincial and territorial elections this fall has followed a faithful pattern. Yes, governments have been returned to office, but at a price. A few unpopular ministers will be looking for new careers. Some of the local party supporters will join them, having offended some local interest groups. Yet, re-election has been a steady pattern, even for regimes that promised, only a year ago, to be on their way to the history books.
Historically, Saskatchewan politics have depended heavily on the weather – not on election day, but in the rest of the year. The Prairie spring and summer were rather wet this year, but the autumn harvest season was glorious. The result, in most areas, was a series of record crops, especially in wheat, barley and canola. Experience reminds us that this is not necessarily good news, except for the hungry people of the world. Too many crops hurt prices. The 1928 harvest was of record size, but historians mark it as the beginning of the Great Depression in Canada: The crops simply could not be sold.
If that happens this year, it will only be evident long after election day. Right now, it plays to Premier Brad Wall's boast that his Saskatchewan Party of former Liberals, Tories, Reformers and an occasional disgruntled NDPer has transformed the province from a taker to a contributor to national equalization payments. Statistically, this was really due to the previous NDP government, traditionally frugal from the days of Tommy Douglas's management. Whatever their opponents believed, CCFers were terrified of putting their government at the mercy of bankers. It was Ross Thatcher's Liberals and Grant Devine's Tories who unbalanced Saskatchewan's finances. The socialists were often restored to power to rescue the province from debt.
If 2011's bumper crop fails to sell, Mr. Wall and his NDP rival, Dwain Lingenfelter, know that, nowadays, Saskatchewan's economy depends on extracting natural resources, not on being the world's breadbasket. The province is now more discreet about being the world's largest uranium producer, but the potash industry produces one of Canada's most beneficial exports as it fertilizes food crops from China to Africa and all over Europe. Mr. Wall's best claim to re-election may be his success in persuading Prime Minister Stephen Harper to chase an Australian multinational out of a deal to buy Saskatchewan's Potash Corp.
Resource development is the big issue in Monday's election. Mr. Lingenfelter, reversing NDP policy, has proposed that a specific share of resource revenues be assigned to the province's first nations as compensation for wealth never mentioned or even imagined in the numbered treaties of the early years of Confederation. His proposal would redirect wealth to the poorest people of Saskatchewan. It could also forestall a first nations lawsuit for full ownership, paralyzing resource development for years as the case dragged through provincial and federal courts. Resource wealth was never mentioned or imagined when the native land claims treaties of the early Confederation years were signed.
Giving first nations priority in sharing resource revenue has been bluntly, even crudely, denounced by Mr. Wall and his partisans, usually in the name of equal shares for all, regardless of status. Resentment of Mr. Lingenfelter's initiative might cost his party support, even among its traditional supporters. On the other hand, the plight of Saskatchewan's first peoples, trapped in urban slums or on bankrupt and ill-served reserves, cries out to the province's powerful sense of justice and appetite for social innovation.
Will Mr. Wall win a new term? Probably, but not surely, whatever the province's opinion-makers want us to believe. There is a profound sense of civic decency in Saskatchewan that outsiders and ideologues often have trouble recognizing.
Desmond Morton, a professor emeritus of history at McGill University, grew up in Saskatchewan in the 1940s and 1950s and holds a Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Saskatchewan.