I doubt we see an NDP party getting in power there. If you go to some of the sask based message boards, they look at Alberta with a lot of sympathy based on the NDP government here.
__________________
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
That's possible, but you'd think he'd say "retiring as Premier" in that case. Too bad for Saskatchewan, I gather he was very popular there. But even beyond that, I can't think of another premier in my memory who was as popular in neighbouring provinces as Wall. He's sort of like the Premier equivalent of Nenshi, in the sense of having other places in the country saying "we wish our Mayor was more like that".
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
I wish we had someone as successful and popular at his job in this province that we could characterize as such.
Tremendous politician who served his province well at a time they needed it.
Define "successful." The guy has run numerous deficits and is overseeing an economy that went from supercharged to struggling in a short amount of time. Obviously that's not all is fault, but if he were an NDP candidate we'd be hearing the typical anti-NDP comments we do around here.
The Following 8 Users Say Thank You to rubecube For This Useful Post:
Wall was generally a good premier largely because when it came down to it he wasn't overly dogmatic. He bent a bit conservative, but was tempered with a healthy amount of pragmatism. Good politicians also know to not overstay their welcome and hang onto power for power's sake. Good on him for calling it quits when it felt right.
__________________
Trust the snake.
The Following User Says Thank You to Bunk For This Useful Post:
Define "successful." The guy has run numerous deficits and is overseeing an economy that went from supercharged to struggling in a short amount of time. Obviously that's not all is fault, but if he were an NDP candidate we'd be hearing the typical anti-NDP comments we do around here.
If he were an NDP candidate the "Supercharged" economy part wouldn't have been part of his run.
The Following 11 Users Say Thank You to Erick Estrada For This Useful Post:
I doubt we see an NDP party getting in power there. If you go to some of the sask based message boards, they look at Alberta with a lot of sympathy based on the NDP government here.
Ha! Caught you in a lie. Everybody knows Saskatchewan doesn't have the internet yet.
The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to PepsiFree For This Useful Post:
“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.
Brad Wall promises to only spend $105.4 million to return Saskatchewan to balanced budgets by 2018
To have or not to have: Premier Brad Wall wants $570M in federal payback for Saskatchewan
Brad Wall vows to reject carbon tax he says will cost Saskatchewan $1 billion a year
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.
——————————
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.
Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall retiring from politics
