Mandryk: Devine election changed Saskatchewan
By Murray Mandryk
Forty years ago this week, Saskatchewan changed forever by electing Grant Devine’s Progressive Conservatives.
In the past four decades since that night of April 26, 1982, many have argued the Devine legacy wasn’t so grandiose.
After all, Progressive Conservatives no longer exist, swallowed up in the August 1997 creation of the Saskatchewan Party by the merger of Liberals and PC MLAs into one unified party.
And when most think of the Devine government legacy, few positives immediately come to mind.
The Devine/PC run lasted less than a decade, crushed in the October 26, 1991 election that saw its whopping 55-seat win in 1982 reduced to a mere ten seats. By the 1995 election, that would be cut in half to five seats and third-party status in the Saskatchewan legislature, surpassed by the woefully Liberal.
By 1999, the PCs only existed on paper, running the minimum ten decades needed to register as an official party — an agreement with the Sask. Party so as not to split the right-wing vote in the province and allow the NDP to win.
In its decade in office, the PC government presented ten straight deficit budgets — the last of which in 1991 didn’t even pass.
Devine’s waning days in office were spent warding off a potential caucus revolt over “Fair Share, Saskatchewan” — the policy that would have shipped 1,500 Regina-based civil servants through communities throughout the province.
Those ten straight deficit budgets forced the province to the brink of bankruptcy, adding roughly a billion dollars a year to public debt. The dire financial straits were the auspice for the then-Roy-Romanow-led NDP government to take drastic austerity measures that included the closure/conversion of 52 rural hospitals and the Plains Health Centre just outside Regina.
But much to the PC government’s discredit, it is the largest criminal scandal in Canadian history for which it is best remembered.
On April 10, 1992 — a decade after its historic win and mere months after the PC’s equally historic loss — officials at a Regina CIBC branch would drill into an unclaimed safety deposit box containing 150 one-thousand dollar bills. This would set off an RCMP investigation that would eventually see 19 PC staff or MLAs charged. The court proceedings would produce 15 convictions. Add two other former PC MLAs charged and convicted of separate offences, and the Devine government was saddled with a legacy of corruption.
It has been easy for many — especially, many New Democrats — to suggest this is all there was to the Devine government.
History, however, tells us otherwise:
In nearly 31 of the 38 years prior to the Devine election, Saskatchewan was ruled by a Co-operative Commmonwealth Federation (CCF) or NDP government. Saskatchewan was best known as the first jurisdiction in North America to elect a social democratic government.
In the 40 years since, Saskatchewan has been ruled by conservative governments for almost 25 years. There’s little to suggest this will change any time soon.
Former political columnist and author Dale Eisler chronicles in his new book From Left to Right: Saskatchewan’s Political and Economic Transformation this province’s shift from the left to the right.
Notwithstanding its scandal and bad fiscal management, Eisler cites that election night as the pivotal moment when the province changed.
“His government was tainted. There’s no doubt about it. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t transformational,” Eisler said in an interview. “Those two things can exist together ...
“What he did was pretty damn significant.”
Eisler noted how the Devine government was the vanguard for both today’s free-market approach to agriculture and to the end of publicly owned resource Crown corporations in oil, gas, mining resources and potash.
These are the things that have transferred Saskatchewan’s economy.
Devine also made way for a change in which the majority of centre-right voters became loyal to a general philosophy rather than a specific party.
Forty years ago, he changed this province.