Saskatchewan Politics

The essays in this volume cover a broad range of topics on Saskatchewan politics, including: the role of the legislature and the Governor General; political institutions (premiers, cabinets, public service, judiciary, commissions); political parties and their history; and social issues & the economy (public finance, health care reform, economic development, rural life, demographics, First Nations, public welfare, federal relations, the media). Appendices include a table of provincial electoral results 1905-99 and lists of Saskatchewan premiers, Lieutenant Governors, and presidents & chiefs of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations.

In his 2001 volume on politics in Saskatchewan, Howard Leeson observed that vast changes were underway in the Saskatchewan polity, and he predicted that the familiar politics of the past would soon look jarringly antiquated. The contributors to this new volume--Saskatchewan Politics: Crowding the Centre--come to the conclusion that this process of change is now largely complete. As its subtitle makes clear, this new study suggests that political parties in the province have crowded closer and closer to the ideological centre. Without the fulcrum of ideological division, politics in the province appears to be more and more about personal and administrative clashes and less and less about substantive differences as to how the economy and society should be organized. In short, left and right are increasingly being left out of provincial politics. Includes a dvd of the 2006-08 Throne and budget debates between NDP leader Lorne Calvert and Saskatchewan Party leader Brad Wall.

The more than 275 biographies of Saskatchewan politicians from the past 100 years that are included in this volume represent but a fraction of those who have been elected to public office in the province. These are only the longer-serving, the most distinguished, the most famous...the most infamous. Together, their individual stories tell our collective political story in Saskatchewan, the birthplace of Medicare and socialism in North America.

"Myth has played an important and ongoing role in the development of Saskatchewan's political economy. First, during the time of the National Policy, Saskatchewan was portrayed to immigrants as a promised land. This period served as the psychological and economic foundation for the provice. When belief in Saskatchewan as a promised land was shattered by the Great Depression and Dirty Thirties, the myth was reconstituted through the inspiration of the social gospel. It was then politically reinvigorated in the meaning of medicare and has been expressed in recent decades through the competing visions for economic development. Through all these eras, no matter what the tides of politics, there remained one constant--the singular, collective idea that Saskatchewan was a special place with unrealized potential. The challenge for the public dialogue of Saskatchewan, as the province enters its second century, is to not replay the mistakes of the past. Saskatchewan people must recognize the role that myth has played, and must continue to play, in the life of the province. But, at the same time, they must differentiate it from reality by understanding the power of myth as a force for progress and its potential to create false expectations."--pub. desc.

Divided looks at the last fifteen years in Saskatchewan, during which time the Saskatchewan Party government sought to reforge the province’s image into the New Saskatchewan: brash, materialistic, highly competitive and aggressively partisan. In the process, a climate of polarization and hyper-partisanship swept the province into a near-perpetual state of anger and social division. These actions are not without consequences. In Divided, diverse voices describe the impact on their lives and communities when simmering wedge issues burst open on social media and in public spaces. The collection dives deep into the long set-up to this moment, from the colonial past to the four decades of neoliberal economics that have widened social and economic gaps across all sectors. Divided positions Saskatchewan as a fascinating case study of the global trends of division and provides testament to the resiliency of a vision of social solidarity against all odds.

The left believes that the absence of state restrictions is not enough because, as former federal NDP leader Ed Broadbent puts it, "the vast majority of choices we make to give substance to the abstract notion of freedom require money."3 While the right-wing notion of negative freedom requires that government activity be sharply limited, the left-wing notion of positive freedom requires that the s [...] There is no doubt rich, expanding the sales whatsoever that the benefits of tax also reduced the these reforms increase-both in absolute dollars and as a progressivity of proportion of income-as one Saskatchewan's tax moves up the income scale.6 system. [...] However, the number of jobs created in the petroleum industry by forgoing royalty revenues will be limited by the fact that its operations employ very few people relative to the capital invested, and are largely headquartered outside the province. [...] The annual cost of reduced royalties is similarly in the hundreds of millions of dollars.20 Saskatchewan's half-billion-dollar deficit is thus attributable to tax cuts costing a quarter of a billion dollars and royalty reductions costing at least a quarter of a billion more. [...] In the 1999 and 2003 elections, the NDP warned that the Saskatchewan Party would probably do the same thing if handed the reins of power.

Social Policy and Social Justice looks concretely at the successes and failures of a social democratic government in Canada (1971-1982) in achieving social justice through its approaches to social policy. Social policy is analyzed widely, including day care, workers’ control, prescription drugs, social assistance, income distribution, legal aid and policing. Additional chapters review the NDP’s re-organization of bureaucracy and allocation of expenditures. Also included are an historical synopsis of the legislation pursued in the period and an analysis of the broader political, economic and sociological contexts in Canada. Social Policy and Social Justice is the first in-depth analysis of social policy at a provincial level. It is the product of the multidisciplinary scholarship of the authors, all of whom have extensive experience in policy-making, policy advocacy or policy research. This book will be an invaluable resource for comparative purposes, particularly since there are now three NDP governments across Canada, and the NDP is undergoing re-evaluation in the wake of the 1993 federal election. It will be of particular interest to those in government, university, community-based or political organizations wanting to re-examine mainstream assumptions about social democracy, social policy and social justice in Canada.