Perspectives of Saskatchewan ed. by Jene M. Porter (review)

Perspectives of Saskatchewan joins Bill Waiser’s Saskatchewan: A New History (2005) as a scholarly legacy of this province’s centennial.

A few essays stand out because they explore previously ignored aspects of the province’s history. Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond discusses the challenges aboriginal people have faced in Saskatchewan over the past century by focusing on the history of her own Muskeg Lake Cree Nation. In undertaking a detailed scholarly study of a single First Nations community, Turpel-Lafond has provided a model for others to follow.

Christine de Clercy examines women’s participation in politics. Notwithstanding the province’s socially progressive history and the electoral success of social democratic political parties there, in 2005 only eleven of the fifty-eight members of the Saskatchewan Legislature were women. Only one woman (Lynda Haverstock) has served as leader of a political party in the province. All of the province’s premiers since 1905 have been men.

Some contributors challenge conventional wisdom about the province. Record low wheat prices and withering drought made the 1930s the worst decade in Saskatchewan’s history, but Brett Fairbairn argues that it also proved to be a time of significant economic innovation whose impact can be seen down to our own day. In 1934 a small group of southern Saskatchewan farmers established a cooperatively owned oil refinery, the forerunner of the heavy oil upgrader and refinery complex that Federated Co-operatives Limited now operates in Regina. And in 1937 Saskatchewan’s first credit unions were founded. Today, as Fairbairn notes, half the residents of the province belong to one.

David Smith offers a fresh perspective on what has been distinctive about Saskatchewan’s political culture. It is not that voters there elected North America’s first socialist government or that it proceeded to enact state hospitalization and Medicare programs soon embraced by all Canadians. What has set Saskatchewan apart has been the continuity of political parties there and their alternation in power. While political parties have of course been defeated in Saskatchewan (the Liberals in 1929 and 1944, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in 1964, and the New Democratic Party in 1982), they have lived to fight another day. When the Liberals eventually disappeared from the political scene, other parties (the Progressive Conservatives and then the Saskatchewan Party) have taken their place as the alternative to the social democrats.

Other contributors examine the evolution of agriculture and the rural economy over the past century; government initiatives to diversify the province’s economy and that of ‘Saskatchewan’s Forgotten North’; Saskatchewan’s role in the shaping of health care policy since 1962; the province’s unions and labour legislation; and the University of Saskatchewan’s contributions to the province since its founding in 1907.

Not all of the essays in Perspectives of Saskatchewan deal with public policy. Keith Bell offers a critical overview of landscape painters and their work through the province’s first half century. Eli Bornstein seeks to do the same for abstract art in the province, though he limits his survey to artists (including himself) ‘who have undertaken abstract public artworks or commissions for public spaces or buildings.’ He does so very effectively with the assistance of colour images of some of them. Neil Besner offers an overview of the prodigious output of Saskatchewan writers of both fiction and poetry. Mark Abley (an English immigrant who grew up mostly in Saskatchewan but now lives in Montreal) offers his perspective on what it means to be part of ‘Saskatchewan’s Diaspora.’

Notwithstanding this book’s long gestation, some factual errors have gone unnoticed, and in at least one case what is said is bound to confuse the reader. The current Canadian Wheat Board was founded in 1935, not in the 1940s, and Tommy Douglas did not come close to defeating the provincial Liberals in the 1938 election (he was still a Member of Parliament in Ottawa at this time). The discussion of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool’s purchase...