Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan is a Canadian Prairie province, located between Alberta and Manitoba.

The largest city is Saskatoon. The second largest city and provincial capital is Regina.

Resources

Agriculture

Saskatchewan is a major agricultural producer.

Potash

Saskatchewan is the world's largest exporter of potash, a vital ingredient in fertilizer, via the state-owned PotashCorp.

Petroleum

Like its neighbour to the west, Alberta, Saskatchewan has an oil and gas industry, though on a smaller scale. These deposits are part of the vast Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin, stretching from British Columbia to Manitoba, as well as parts of Montana and North Dakota.

Conventional

Saskatchewan's first commercial crude oil discovery was made in 1944. It produces approximately 17 percent of total Canadian oil production. Crude oil production in 2006 was a record 24.84 million cubic metres (156.3 million barrels). Remaining recoverable reserves at December 31, 2005 were estimated to be approximately 187 million cubic metres (1.18 billion barrels). Saskatchewan produces most of its petroleum from four major regions: Lloydminster, Kindersley-Kerrobert, Swift Current, and Weyburn-Estevan.

Oil Sands

The province's oil sands deposits are located principally in the Clearwater Valley area, near Churchill Lake. Unlike Alberta's booming Athabasca Oil Sands, Saskatechewan's deposits are located deeper and therefore cannot be surface-mined.

Culture

The Yorkton Short Film and Video Festival is North America's longest continuously running film festival.

Sports

see Canadian sports

The Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League became the 2007 Grey Cup champions.

History

Province 1905-1918

When Saskatchewan became a province in 1905, political leaders at the time proclaimed its destiny was to become Canada's most powerful province. Saskatchewan embarked on an ambitious province-building program based on its Anglo-Canadian culture and wheat production for the export market. Population quintupled from 91,000 in 1901 to 492,000 to 1911, thanks to heavy immigration of farmers from the U.S., Germany and Scandinavia. Efforts were made to assimilate the newcomers to British Canadian culture and values.

In the 1905 provincial elections, Liberals won 16 of 25 seats in Saskatchewan. The Saskatchewan government bought out Bell Telephone Company in 1909, with the government owning the long-distance lines and left local service to small companies organized at the municipal level. Premier Walter Scott preferred government assistance to outright ownership because he thought enterprises worked better if citizens had a stake in running them; he set up the Saskatchewan Cooperative Elevator Company in 1911. Despite pressure from farm groups for direct government involvement in the grain handling business, the Scott government opted to loan money to a farmer-owned elevator company. Saskatchewan in 1909 provided bond guarantees to railway companies for the construction of branch lines, alleviating the concerns of farmers who had trouble getting their wheat to market by wagon.

The province responded to the First World War in 1914 with patriotic enthusiasm and enjoyed the resultant economic boom. The price of wheat tripled and acreage seeded doubled. The wartime spirit of sacrifice intensified social reform movements that had predated the war and now came to fruition. Saskatchewan gave woimen the right to vote in 1916 and at the end 1916 passed a referendum to prohibit the sale of alcohol.

1919-39

The war created an angry agrarian protest movement. Prairie farmers had long considered themselves the victims of powerful corporations--grain companies, banks, and railways -- all based in Toronto and Montreal. Attacks on industrialists and financiers blamed high tariffs designed to protect manufacturers at the expense of farmers. During the war farmers felt doubly betrayed. The federal government first promised to exempt their sons from compulsory military service, then cancelled the exemption. It imposed a ceiling on wheat prices when they were high, but removed the floor when they were low. The farmers' pent-up frustration led to the formation of the Progressive Party in several provinces; it sent 64 to Ottawa in the 1921 general election.

The Saskatchewan Grain Growers' Association worked with the provincial Liberals and kept them in office until 1929, when a Conservative-led coalition was elected for a term. As wheat prices recovered the late 1920s were golden years. By 1927 Saskatchewan ranked first among the provinces in the production of wheat, oats, rye, and flax, and in sundry other areas. Most important, it ranked first in per capita wealth. With a population of 922,000 in 1931 ranked third in size, behind only Ontario and Quebec.

The Great Depression hit the prairies hard. The world market for wheat collapsed and per capita money income fell 75%. Relief expenditures in the province in 1937 exceeded $40 million, dwarfing the entire 1939 provincial budget of $23 million. The hard-pressed government imposed a new 2% sales tax to cover the promissory notes that had been given to teachers in lieu of salaries.

Tommy Douglas and CCF

A new political movement emerged, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF); its 1933 manifesto promised to eradicate capitalism and put in place a "full program of socialized planning which will lead to the establishment in Canada of the Co-operative Commonwealth." Tommy Douglas, (1904-86), a Baptist minister from working class origins, led the CCF to power from 1944-61. Douglas headed the first socialist government elected in Canada, and is recognized as the father of socialized medicine and the leader who put democratic socialism in the mainstream of Canadian politics.

The CCF won in June 1944 with a "Pocket Platform" calling for home ownership and debt reduction; increased old age pensions, mother's allowances, and disability care; medical, dental, and hospital services; equal education; free speech and religion; collective bargaining; and the encouragement of economic cooperatives. The CCF, while rhetorically socialist, did not nationalize banking or industry; it sought a mixed economy, including public, private, and cooperative sectors, with a strong role for private ownership in innovation and competition. In its first term the CCF passed a farm security act, and introduced the most prolabour trade union act in North America. Saskatchewan became the first province to allow civil servants to organize unions (1944), the first to enshrine a bill of rights prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, colour, or creed (1947), the first to implement compulsory government automobile insurance (1946), and the first to institute a hospital insurance plan (1947).

The CCF was committed to efficiency-oriented planning. Douglas set up an Economic Advisory and Planning Board (EAPB), a cabinet committee with a supporting secretariat, charged with planning economic development strategies for the province and evaluating overall policies and programs. The EAPB evolved into two new agencies: the Budget Bureau and the Government Finance Office. The former was the secretariat for the Treasury Board, the committee of cabinet in charge of allocating budgetary expenditures. In addition, the Budget Bureau had an Organization and Methods unit, which surveyed the operations of various government departments and made recommendations on how they could be managed more effectively. Budgeting became more than the mechanical exercise of allocating money; it became the meeting point of the decision-making process, where all the Douglas government's diverse priorities were integrated.

The CCF set up eleven small Crown corporations including power and telephone utilities bus and airline companies, and ventures into sodium sulphate mining, a woollen mill, and a shoe factory. By 1949 the eleven corporations employed 3,000 workers and had annual revenues of $25 million.

Prosperity returned after 1945, and the population increased gradually. More dramatic was the movement from farms to towns and cities as farming became more mechanized and capital intensive. Increased production of oil, gas, and uranium, and the beginnings of a potash industry helped diversify the economy beyond just wheat.

Native policies

Douglas brought First Nations delegates together in 1946 to form a single organization to represent Indian interests. Three existing organizations merged into the Union of Saskatchewan Indians, which later became the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN). Douglas's EAPB prepared an in-depth analysis of the demographic, social, and economic challenges facing the First Nation population. In the 21st century the FSIN is a strong policy-making and program-delivery organization, arguably one of the most effective of its kind in Canada. CCF initiatives included encouraging northern aboriginals to trade their seminomadic lifestyles for lives in urban settings. The establishment of Kinoosao on Reindeer Lake provides an example of how CCF planners established new villages; community development processes excluded local people. Yet, in spite of considerable resistance, various incentives and coercive measures resulted in the movement of nearly all northerners to permanent settlements.

Socialized medicine

In 1959, Douglas promised universal medical care insurance, based on pre-payment, quality service and government administration, and through a scheme acceptable to both doctors and patients. The election of 1960 was fought on this issue; the doctors campaigning against it, but the CCF won. The Saskatchewan Medical Care Insurance Bill became law in November 1961, after Woodrow S. Lloyd became premier. The medical society announced doctors would their refuse to participate, complaining that it would bring regimentation and would interfere with the doctor-patient relationship. The doctors did strike for a few weeks in July, 1962, but returned when new legislation allowed them to practise outside the system. Eventually the Saskatchewan plan was so popular that in 1968 the federal government extended it nationwide.

Douglas resigned as premier in 1961 to lead the federal New Democratic Party, a formal alliance between the CCF and organized labour. Douglas was defeated in the federal election of 1962, due to the backlash against the Saskatchewan government's introduction of Medicare, which produced a long and bitter strike by the province's physicians.

The impact of the Douglas government on the rest of the country was profound, both in public policy and the bureaucratic machinery devised to implement it. Even when Ross Thatcher's Liberals defeated the CCF in 1964, the former administration's influence continued to ripple out from Regina, as senior civil servants left the province and became influential elsewhere.

Recent history

In 2005 two-thirds of the province's population lived in urban areas, there was a diverse economic base, and citizens enjoyed a rich cultural life.

Bibliography

• The Canadian Encyclopedia (2008) a very good starting point
• The Dictionary of Canadian Biography(1966-2006), scholarly biographies of every important person who died by 1930
• Barnhart, Gordon L., ed. Saskatchewan Premiers of the Twentieth Century. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2004. 418 pp.
• Calder, Alison and Wardhaugh, Robert, ed. History, Literature, and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies.U. of Manitoba Press, 2005. 310 pp.
• Dale-Burnett, Lisa, ed. Saskatchewan Agriculture: Lives Past and Present. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, (2006) 205 pp. short biographies
• DeClercy, Cristine. "Women and the Public Sphere in Saskatchewan, 1905-2005." Prairie Forum 2007 32(2): 357-382. Issn: 0317-6282
• Emery, George. The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896-1914. McGill-Queen's U. Press, 2001. 259 pp.
• Friesen, Gerald. The Canadian Prairies: A History (2nd ed. 1987)
• Harding, Jim, ed. Social Policy and Social Justice: The NDP Government in Saskatchewan during the Blakeney Years. (1995).
• Hayden, Michael. Seeking a Balance: The University of Saskatchewan, 1907-1982 (1983) online edition
• Hewitt, Steve. Riding to the Rescue: The Transformation of the RCMP in Alberta and Saskatchewan, 1914-1939. (2006). 205 pp.
• Hodgson, Heather, ed. Saskatchewan Writers: Lives Past and Present. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2004. 247 pp.
• Johnson, A. W. Dream No Little Dreams: A Biography of the Douglas Government of Saskatchewan, 1944-1961. U. of Toronto Press, 2004. 370 pp.
• Keahey, Deborah. Making It Home: Place in Canadian Prairie Literature. U. of Manitoba Press, 1998. 178 pp.
• Lipset, Seymour Martin. Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan, a Study in Political Sociology (1950) online edition
• Laycock, David. Populism and Democratic Thought in the Canadian Prairies, 1910 to 1945. U. of Toronto Press, 1990. 369 pp.
• Palmer, Howard. The Settlement of the West (1977) online edition
• Pitsula, James M. "Disparate Duo" Beaver 2005 85(4): 14-24, a comparison with Alberta, Fulltext in EBSCO
• Pitsula, James M. and Ken Rasmussen. Privatizing a Province: The New Right in Saskatchewan. (1990), an attack from the left
• Stewart, Walter. The Life and Political Times of Tommy Douglas. (2003)
• Thompson, John Herd. Forging the Prairie West. (1998)
• Wardhaugh, Robert A. Mackenzie King and the Prairie West. (2000). 328 pp.
• Wardhaugh, Robert A., ed. Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture, and History. (2001). 234 pp.
• Warren, Jim and Carlisle, Kathleen, eds. On the Side of the People: A History of Labour in Saskatchewan. Regina: Coteau Books, 2005. 344 pp.
• Waiser, Bill, and John Perret. Saskatchewan: A New History (2005), the major scholarly biography

Primary sources

• Thomas, Lewis Herbert, and T. C. Douglas. The Making of a Socialist: The Recollections of T.C. Douglas (1984) online edition