Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe has a vision: a province with 1.4 million people by 2030. It’s a worthy goal, and certainly achievable. The sad part is, it could have—and should have, happened a long time ago. The province grew like a weed from the start, and was already Canada’s third most populous province in 1911. But that growth flattened like its prairie landscape from the 1930s until early in the 21st Century. Socialism strangled Saskatchewan in the cradle, and the prosperity it exiled to Alberta only adds to the proof..Both provinces had every reason to grow, blessed with a large land mass, abundant resources, and good farm land. The pioneers who settled Alberta and Saskatchewan were inherently entrepreneurial. The only handout the government gave them was a quarter-section of land. The rest was up to them. Faith, family, and a strong work ethic were combined with co-operation and interdependence. It was the winning combination necessary to survive, and later, to thrive. .In 1920, Regina became the first Canadian city to have a licensed airport. As the decade ended, it even had a General Motors plant. Saskatchewan took the Western lead, with Alberta taking a similar course until the 1930s. At that point, Saskatchewan took the path less travelled – and that made all the unfortunate difference..Fourteen years after the Winnipeg General Strike, Marxism staked its ground in Saskatchewan’s capital. In 1933, the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) penned the Regina Manifesto. It read,.The principle regulating production, distribution and exchange will be the supplying of human needs and not the making of profits..We aim to replace the present capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a social order from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede unregulated private enterprise and competition, and in which genuine democratic self-government, based upon economic equality will be possible..The CCF radicals didn’t catch on at first. Tommy Douglas failed to get a provincial seat when he ran for the party in 1934. Decades later, he reminisced about early campaign stops at country schools. .“We encouraged questions, and people asked us if it was true we were going to take their farms, like the Soviets in Russia, and did we believe in God.” .One year after losing the provincial election, voters made Douglas a CCF federal Member of Parliament. .That same year of 1935, the Regina riot took place. Spurred by the Communist-affiliated Relief Camp Workers’ Union, hundreds of men left those camps and assembled in Vancouver to demand more from the government. Led by Communist Arthur “Slim” Evans, they decided to take their grievances to Ottawa. They rode east on boxcars. After they spent two weeks in Regina, the police decided to crack down. When the Mounties tried to arrest the ringleaders on July 1, a riot ensued. The police opened fire, injuring hundreds..The CCF continued to gain momentum. Douglas resigned his federal seat in 1944 to run provincially again. This time, he was elected premier, a position he would hold for 17 years. He was also the first leader of an explicitly socialist government in North America..“People thought the world was coming to an end,” Douglas said, “that this was the beginning of a Communist revolution and we were going to wreck the province, ruin the finances, repudiate all our debts. Imperial Oil were doing some small amount of drilling in Saskatchewan. They just picked up their drilling rigs and went home.”.Awhile later, Imperial Oil offered $20 million a year (two-thirds of the Saskatchewan budget) for an oil monopoly in the province. Douglas recalled, “I remember what I said to Imperial Oil: ‘Get lost’.”.Saskatchewan’s loss was Alberta’s gain. Imperial Oil was determined to strike oil in Wild Rose Country no matter what. They spent millions of dollars in 133 desperate and unsuccessful attempts. Finally, they decided if nothing was found in another half-dozen attempts, they’d just stop trying..Then, early in 1947, Vern Hunter made a find near Leduc, Alberta that looked promising. Imperial Oil asked him to set a date for a well to be dug. “The crew and I were experts at abandoning wells but we didn’t know much about completing them. I named February 13 and started praying,” Hunter said. Five hundred people watched as the well brought up oil..Edmonton and Calgary doubled their population in a short time. Dan Claypool worked at Leduc #1 in the early years. .“You couldn’t get a hotel room … roughnecks were living in granaries, and even the energy regulators from the government had no place to live. So Imperial Oil lent them a skid shack. It was crazy, trucks were coming and going day and night on the highway. It was the greatest economic event to ever happen in Canada. It was really a boom.”.By then it was impossible for any entrepreneur in Saskatchewan to boom – the government owned everything. Tommy Douglas told the House of Commons in 1943, “We believe there should be government ownership of monopolistic enterprises.” When he became premier, he made that happen. When he opened the legislature on October 19, 1944, he introduced 76 pieces of legislation that put the government’s fingers on everything. It brought in mandatory health insurance, a provincial bus company, SaskTel, SaskPower, SaskWater, SaskEnergy, regulations galore, and the highest taxes in Canada..“We told people,” Douglas said, “if you’re going to build schools or hospitals or roads, you’re going to pay for it. Now!”.In 1951, Douglas told the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities, “The inescapable fact is that when we build a society based on greed, selfishness, and ruthless competition, the fruits we can expect to reap are economic insecurity at home and international discord abroad.” .The CCF brought economic security all right – a constant, stifling government presence everyone could count on to bring mediocrity – or worse. Even a government-run shoe factory and woolen mill in Moose Jaw went broke. And the army of civil servants hired for this massive socialist experiment became better paid than the taxpaying residents..Douglas declared in 1960 that laissez-faire capitalism had ended in Saskatchewan, just as the Regina Manifesto had envisioned. The Berlin Wall was built a year later, and Saskatchewan would have needed a similar structure to keep its own. .“Our best export is our people,” residents came to say. Others joked, “Will the last person to leave please turn out the light?”.Canada’s breadbasket – which had 921,000 people in 1931 – still had just 968,000 in 2006. Meanwhile, Alberta grew from 731,000 people to nearly 4.4 million today. Saskatchewan ex-pat oil executives in Edmonton and Calgary jokingly called their former province, “the old country.” Proof of the Saskatchewan diaspora was made evident by fans wearing green at Roughrider games in every city. Some still left in the homeland, drove with novelty license plates which read, “Soviet Saskatchewan Smothered in Socialism,” complete with a hammer and sickle.. Alberta Sask population .Then, less than fifteen years ago, the socialist chokehold lost its grip. .In December 2006, public opinion polls showed over 50 per cent support for Brad Wall’s right-leaning Saskatchewan Party. Investors realized that a more business-friendly government was imminent and started investing their money. By the time Wall’s Sask Party ended sixteen years of NDP government in November of 2007, the boom was already underway. The average price of a home in Regina rose from 131,000 in 2006 to 228,000 in 2008—a telltale sign that the province had escaped a cocoon it had been stuck in for far too long..Saskatchewan has grown substantially during the Sask Party era, and now boasts 1.17 million people. Moe’s ambitious goal of 1.4 million people by 2030 seems ambitious but well within reason, especially if the province can meet its other target: 600,000 barrels of daily oil production. Of course, Alberta is already there. It drills nearly eight times as much crude oil as Saskatchewan, above and beyond its oil sands.. Trudeau on WE scandal: Case closed .Had Saskatchewan never embraced socialism, would Alberta have ever become what it is today? Would it have had two NHL teams, and a long line of Stanley Cup winners? Or would those teams have been based in Saskatoon and Regina instead?.If Saskatchewan’s pain was Alberta’s gain, what’s left for the lesser of two provinces? Potentially quite a bit. While it may be true that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, Saskatchewan seems to have undergone a permanent change in its attitude and political stance. Residents can only hope that Victorian novelist George Eliot was right: “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”
