Saskatchewan is a unique province. In fact all 10 provinces and three territories are unique and that is why our country is so wonderfully adept at taking on all types of challenges. Some of us have similar traits with other provinces, but we hardly ever agree, and we can be particularly stubborn and protective of our status within confederation.
One thing that has continually struck us about our own province is the fact that while yes, our geographic borders are man-made and boring, the rest of our make-up is pretty interesting.
We are blessed with all kinds of natural resources the rest of the world would love to have. We are learning how to manage and dispense them with each passing year. We're getting rather good at it, but of course, there will always be critics lined up to tell us where we're going wrong. Some we listen to, others we dismiss.
But we still believe our province faces its biggest challenge in the form of our population disparity.
We have celebrated our recent growth to nearly 1.2 million people. That's the greatest population we've ever had. Yet, at the same time, that barely constitutes the population of one decent-sized city in most other domains.
We have two small or medium-sized metropolitan masses we like to refer to as our major centres of commerce, and between the two of them, they constitute about 50 per cent of our total population.
So here comes the problem.
The rest of us are scattered all over. There are no regional resource or economic pockets of population concentrations. We're simply scattered, and that makes governance a pretty big challenge.
Saskatchewan probably has more rural municipalities, hamlets, villages and towns between 50 and 4,000 people than any other province in Canada. And we settled in the far north and the deep southeast and west and then told our provincial service sectors to come and find us and give us what we expected, and it had to be just as good or better than what they provided the citizens of Regina and Saskatoon.
When consolidation of population and economic forces were suggested we rejected the idea. At least we did when RM consolidation was brought to the table. We liked our 300 RM kingdoms and told the government in no uncertain terms where to take their consolidation act.
When it came to bringing school divisions and hospital district regions into a more manageable mode, governments took a different approach, a more authoritarian one that tended to work. At least from a governance perspective, it worked. Forced amalgamation for health and education happened. It is now past the 10-year point, and we're still learning how to cope with unnatural partnerships, but we'll stay the course until the next efficiency proposal surfaces.
That's why we need to give our provincial governing bodies a little leeway when it comes to administering to our diverse little crowd of party goers. For some reason we have always preferred to scatter ourselves into tiny pockets of population and then tell the people we choose to serve us, to come and get us and give us their best. And we don't like it when they can't. We are just like that and wouldn't have it any other way.
