‘Peace, Progress and Prosperity’: A Biography of Saskatchewan's First Premier, T. Walter Scott by Gordon L. Barnhart (review)

284 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 much more. Now, that must sound like an advertisement, which is my fond wish for this review. (GERALD LYNCH) Gordon L. Barnhart. >Peace, Progress and Prosperity=: A Biography of Saskatchewan=s First Premier, T. Walter Scott Canadian Plains Research Center. viii, 188. $24.95 Walter Scott was Saskatchewan=s first premier. While no single individual may be credited with founding the province, Scott, more than anyone, was responsible for laying the foundation of institutions and policies that carried Saskatchewan through good and bad times for some decades. That is one of the themes of Gordon Barnhart=s book, and explains its title. Nearly a century later, Saskatchewan is a have-not province with a stagnant population. But during Scott=s career as premier (1905B16), it ranked third in population after Ontario and Quebec and, until the twin calamities of depression and drought during the 1930s, possessed great expectations. A second, darker theme to Walter Scott=s story concerns his illegitimacy, chronic illness, depression, and, finally, confinement to a mental institution, where he died twenty years after leaving public office. His was a private life that appeared to have little emotional sustenance: a grade 8 education to which he made frequent and depreciating reference; financial success as a newspaper owner but no evident satisfaction as a journalist; a remarkably undemonstrative relationship with his wife and adopted daughter even when allowing for social conventions that limited expression of personal feelings. A manic-depressive, Scott spent inordinate time as premier in search of cures for his illness. HUMANITIES 285 Remarkably, political accomplishment accompanied personal anguish. Despite emotional instability, Scott=s public legacy is one of restraint in policy, accommodation and consultation with the public, and a civic expansiveness manifested in sound institutions and magnificent public buildings such as the legislative building in Regina, the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, and a series of imposing courthouses and other facilities across the southern half of the province. Barnard says these buildings >reflected the attitudes of the people and helped shape attitudes and beliefs of the generations to come.= However, there is more portent than revelation in the comment, since he offers no evidence to support this causal connection. Nonetheless, it is an intriguing proposition, if only because the interposition of the public and private spheres is a continuing theme of Saskatchewan history. For the last halfcentury , the province=s politics have oscillated between the two spheres, as represented on the one hand by the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and its successor the New Democratic Party (NDP) and on the other by the Liberal, Progressive Conservative, and Saskatchewan parties. The distinctive feature of Scott=s tenure in office was his capacity to harness these rival forces. The Liberal parties of the adjacent prairie provinces proved less adroit, succumbing to the pressure of the organized farmers on several fronts, not least the electoral. The triumph of the CCF in 1944 marked the triumph of the public over the private and signalled a realignment in provincial politics. Since then, in 1964 and 1982 (and in all likelihood in the first election of the new century), the defeat of the NDP has been followed by a reassertion of the private over the public. This lurching from left to right and back again was foreign to Scott and his immediate successors as premiers of Saskatchewan. The reason for that difference remains underexplained in this biography, perhaps necessarily so since the answer lies in the complex simplicities of federalism, the national party structure, a one-crop economy, an immense immigrant population, and a culture of rapid development that depended for support upon government by whoever led. Scott=s is a complex personality, and it is no great criticism of this book to say that the source of his strengths and weakness remain a mystery at its end. How did a man, himself so emotionally insecure, win the loyalty of colleagues and public? How did he, a man Barnhart says knew no personal peace, instil a political culture of moderation and administrative stability? (DAVID E. SMITH) Diana M.A. Relke. Greenwor(l)ds: Ecocritical Readings of Canadian Women=s Poetry University of Calgary Press 1999. 364 $24...