Allow me to take you back to the ancient and pre-historic times dear diary. In my good old high school days I was forging out a legend in my mind as a non-scholastic thinker of thoughts, which are good things to think about … I think.
I was puzzled with one driving question.
Why can’t we all just get along?
It seems, when it comes to Eastern and Western Canada, we continue to be at loggerheads.
That defined line that used to be resource-driven economy versus manufacturing economy is lessened, but there is still that divide.
I recall moving to Ontario and being accepted, sort of, but being consistently reminded that I was one of those outsiders from the west and some nebulous place like Thunder Bay or Lake of the Woods was the dividing line.
Ontario and Quebec were the manufacturing and cultural Mecca. Atlantic Canada and Maritimes were the fishers and potato growers and the rest were hewers of wood and water haulers.
But as an emerging cynic, I could not help but notice that in many respects, we were supposed to be the ones with the advantage. We had oil, potash, uranium, diamonds, gold, coal, wheat and other fine crops. British Columbia had lumber, weather and tourism, yet for some strange reason, we were “just Saskatchewan,” and we really didn’t count.
Ontario had the population and big highways and therefore set the economic tone although they had no legitimate right to do so. The votes simply overwhelmed economic and resource-fueled logistics. We would be reminded of this every time a federal election came along, even when Western Canadians became Prime Ministers, they still could be put in their place by the ruling class.
In those fledgling days, medieval days I would often think, and sometime pontificate on reasons as to why Saskatchewan never unleashed its resource and economic powers.
Now that we have, to some degree, I find it rather satisfying and I’m glad it happened in my lifetime.
But what were we waiting for?
Were we saving for some bigger moment in Canada’s life cycle? Was there a secret economic or political reason why we never played our resource cards?
The idea of shipping coal, oil, potash, uranium to Eastern Canada to feed their markets made sense, but they started to get these products from elsewhere. For quite some time we seemed to be more tied to a north-south market configuration than a west to east movement.
We finally started to play our economic cards, 25 years after Alberta, and the benefits began to accrue and to this day, even with resource doldrums, we’ll forge through with at least one flag flying as long as we don’t get too tied up with foreign currencies. After all this time, we must have learned that in this game, we’re pretty well on our own.
Yes, we contemplate selling farmland to foreigners (that includes Ontario driven CPP investment bankers).
Yes, we’ve sold the Wheat Pool and no longer call those shots.
We still have a shot at deriving something from potash and oil, but we’ve sold some of that to foreign takers too, because it seems as if we Saskatchewanians are not too driven to succeed when it comes to owning and managing our own resources unless we do it within a Crown Corporation. We prefer to sell and then run the beer gardens for outside owners.
If that’s our legacy, and we don’t have the cash or moxie, to run our own ship, so be it. At least we’ve unleashed the dog and we’re letting it run.
