Rural Saskatchewan might be unnerved to know that the bureaucrat who once had a key role in the closure of 52 rural hospitals is now providing recommendations on the future of rural schools.
But there is less reason to worry here than one may think.
Retired Saskatchewan deputy minister Dan Perrins is the kind of man that has always done a good job of fairly assessing situations.
And he’s certainly not the kind of man who simply supplies his masters with what they want to hear.
Some of you will assume that’s a rarity for a bureaucrat… even an impossibility.
Like politicians that go against the grain, bureaucrats that don’t provide exactly what their masters want don’t tend to go as far in their careers as Dan Perrins has.
But as it now applies to the current review, it’s actually rather hard to figure out what education minister Don Morgan wants.
Morgan did serve notice last month that everything was on the table. If so, that could not only include an end to the duly elected school boards and a replacement by government-appointed boards, but also a downsizing of rural schools.
But that is something that wouldn’t seem to be in the interests of the Saskatchewan Party government. Even if it truly saw savings in eliminating local control of school boards or cutting back rural education, one doubts that it would be eager to impose such a drastic move like that on its strong rural base.
For various reasons, it doesn’t necessarily seem like the thing that Perrins would be eager to recommend, either.
For starters, Morgan has already made it known that he has no interest combining the public and separate school systems.
Moreover, Saskatchewan in the past quarter century has already reduced the number of school boards from 111 in 1992 to the current 28 boards, which include 18 public, eight Roman Catholic, one Protestant and one francophone board. Are there really any more administration savings to be had?
One guesses that Perrins has also come to this conclusion.
Perrins would recognize that Saskatchewan’s 28 school boards is fewer than in provinces like Ontario, B.C. and even Manitoba, which is of comparable size.
The experience of the long-serving bureaucrats who have presided over some of the most raucous issues in recent provincial history – the 1989 shutdown of Bosco Homes, the 1993 hospital closures, the 2004 Spudco report and the 2009 report on the future of Saskatchewan’s uranium and nuclear development – has a rare ability to deal to nimbly deal with a wide variety of problems.
For example, rural Saskatchewan people might not have accepted there was any rhyme or reason to the closure of those hospitals back in 1993.
But let us be clear that back in 1993, there were 134 hospitals in Saskatchewan, which is virtually the same number of hospitals as there were in 1983 and in 1973.
Unfortunately, that robbed the province of other health care amenities like specialists, of which we had fewer per capita than most other provinces.
Some will argue that this was the bureaucrat’s argument of the time.
But it was bureaucrats like Perrins that recognized the best deployment of health dollars wasn’t in having under-utilized beds in rural hospitals.
It would be nice for rural Saskatchewan people to have their local hospitals, but it’s even nicer that surgical wait times are down and access to specialists are up.
However, one should entrust that a veteran bureaucrat like Perrins would further recognize the difference in education where every student – rural or urban – requires the same basic level of education.
This does not mean that Perrins won’t be recommending changes, some of which may not be all that popular.
But rural people shouldn’t necessarily fear what this long-serving bureaucrat recommends.
