[Flash Walken]

Great article on Wall from a year ago:

“I think Wall himself speaks to this question very well,” says Todd MacKay, Prairie director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “He consistently points out that Saskatchewan has been very blessed with tremendous resources and at this point in history, there have been tremendous prices for those resources.

“Those are blessings that no one controls.”

As for what has been in Wall’s control, his fiscal legacy is mixed.

By the government’s accounting, the three years after his election produced impressive budget surpluses. By 2010, however, Saskatchewan was in the red. The bleeding was stanched by 2013, but once again the ledger looks precariously close to red ink.

Much of that volatility can be blamed on fluctuating resource revenues — though, as critics have pointed out, Saskatchewan’s last budget claimed a surplus even though the government had borrowed $700 million for infrastructure spending.

Meanwhile, Wall’s attempts to pay off the public debt have stalled, while per-capita spending has increased steadily.

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New Democrat Andrew Thomson, a former Saskatchewan finance minister who went on to run for the federal NDP in Toronto, says Wall’s first three years in office, which coincided with high commodity prices, saw a 30 per cent increase in public spending. Notably, Thomson says, in 2008 the province gave nurses a 35-per-cent, four-year wage increase.

“It’s easy retail politics,” he says. “The simplest thing to do is buy as many friends as you can and hope the good times last. The typical Wall approach was to buy happiness. The problem is that this doesn’t go on forever, and it’s not a long-term strategy.”

As in other resource-based jurisdictions, little was done during the good years to diversify the economy, so when resource revenues dropped, so did government cash flow. Last fall, Standard and Poor’s revised its outlook for Saskatchewan from stable to negative because of concerns over its reliance on resources.

This year’s budget — which Wall has postponed until after the election, eliciting outrage from Broten — is expected to deliver a hefty dose of bad news, and to show a deficit, with another to come. It may violate the government’s own balanced-budget legislation, and would be Wall’s fifth deficit budget since 2007.

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Of course, a leader can’t be judged on the books alone. Wall’s tenure has been successful in fostering a renewed sense of pride in his province — and if that’s intangible, that doesn’t mean it’s not important. His government has been aggressive in its pursuit of Saskatchewan’s interests nationally — clashes with Trudeau over carbon pricing and relief for resource-sector workers are recent examples — in balance with the largely unambitious (or, perhaps more accurately, non-interventionist) agenda one might expect of a conservative premier.

That said, Wall can boast a few ideological victories. In 2010, he announced a plan to move some surgeries from hospitals to for-profit clinics in an effort to reduce wait times. The initiative — in the birthplace of Canadian health care — respects the single-payer principle, but contracts out procedures like dental and knee surgeries.

Though lamented by the left, the program is now largely regarded as a success; it has reduced waiting lists and costs, notes another former NDP finance minister, Janice MacKinnon, now a professor at the University of Saskatchewan.

“When he said he was doing private, for-profit clinics he said, ‘Judge it on the results. Don’t judge it on whether it sounds like it’s a good idea, judge it on the results,’ ” MacKinnon says. “People are practical here. They ask, ‘Does it work? Will it actually be effective in the long term?’ ”

She is less generous about Wall’s 2012 decision to cancel the province’s film tax credit. Jurisdictions all over the world compete in offering tax breaks to attract television and movie production. Saskatchewan’s credit subsidized more than half the labour costs for popular shows like Corner Gas and Little Mosque on the Prairie. Wall didn’t feel the government received enough in return and cancelled the program, prompting outrage from industry groups who claimed the province ultimately received more in tax revenue than it lost.

Compared to Kathleen Wynne, I guess he’s conservative.

Then. there’s Wall’s attempts to play footsie with liquor deregulation. Last year, the province announced it would sell 40 government-run liquor stores to the private sector and allow 12 more private stores to open in underserved communities.

For MacKinnon, the premier’s liquor policy is indicative of his conservatism. Though he occasionally caters to nod to more puritan Prairie mores (last year, the government banned stripping, unless the proceeds went to charity), he is generally centrist.

“When the national press looks at Brad Wall, they see an ultra-conservative guy — which is actually not at all true,” she says.

Adds Gormley, Wall came to power by cobbling together a big-tent, centre-right party that could challenge the dominant NDP, which had been Saskatchewan’s natural governing party thanks to its ability to split the vote on the right and play wedge politics.

Wall’s real success came from his ability to create a coalition of mainstream, non-New Democrats and keep them in the same party.

That’s not a strategy conducive to radicalism of any stripe. Indeed, Wall has steered well clear of sacred cows that might prove irresistible to a more rabid conservative, such Saskatchewan’s four major Crown corporations, which he has made no move to privatize in whole or in part.

“Compared to (Ontario Premier) Kathleen Wynne, I guess he’s conservative,” Gormley says.

http://nationalpost.com/news/politic...a-bbf3211a0922