It was the kind of unbridled optimism about Saskatchewan’s potential for growth and development that makes author and senior federal bureaucrat Dale Eisler smile in wonder.
He has heard it all before.
The author of the book False Expectations: Politics and the Pursuit of the Saskatchewan Myth argues that since its settlement and creation as a province more than a century ago, Saskatchewan boosters always have created unrealistic goals.
He calls it “the desire to turn Saskatchewan into something it isn’t, but what myth tells us it might be.”
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Over the years, the Next Great Thing that would transform the provincial economy has ranged from new crops and crop varieties to potash, farm diversification, industrial crown corporations and rural fibre optics.
This time, it is the potential for biofuel.
At a June meeting of the House of Commons agriculture committee, Saskatchewan ethanol promoter Lionel Labelle told MPs that development of a biofuel industry in the province will transform rural Saskatchewan.
Eisler said in an interview that provincial history is littered with such claims of future glory. Three years ago, enthusiasts gathered at a University of Saskatchewan conference to discuss how the provincial population could double in 30 years.
Even as the province has slid from Canada’s fastest growing in the early 20th century to a jurisdiction that struggles to hold its population and economic base, dreamers have imagined better days ahead in Next Year Country.
“It’s not that Saskatchewan has been a failure. In many ways it has been very successful and it commands fierce loyalty from its people,” said the Saskatchewan native, former journalist and currently a senior Privy Council official as assistant secretary to the federal cabinet for communications and consultations.
“It just has never lived up to all the hype somehow.”
In his book, Eisler says the myth of Saskatchewan’s unlimited potential was created a century ago when prime minister Wilfrid Laurier’s government made prairie settlement the final piece in the National Policy. The government decided to create a rural agricultural society and economy as the best way to protect the Prairies from American expansion pressure, create a market for industrial goods produced in eastern cities and provide business for the railroads.
Europe and areas of the United States were blanketed with promotional material that described free land and an agricultural paradise. The propaganda lured hundreds of thousands who quickly discovered a sometimes harsh and unbroken land rather than the bucolic scenes promised.
“It was a noble venture but less than truthful,” Eisler said. “Right from the beginning, the settlement policy and the economic promise was a bit of a distorted notion.”
Settlement of the Prairies was haphazard and uncontrolled with too many towns created and an infrastructure that was stretched and expensive.
“I think the rest of the 20th century was the proof that the settlement policy and the kind of spread-out rural society that was created was not sustainable,” he said. “Rural depopulation and disappearing towns have been the painful adjustment result.”
By the 1940s, Saskatchewan leaders were desperate to find a firmer base for the economy than the cyclical boom-and-bust agricultural economy that had been devastated during the 1930s drought and depression.
Eisler said it has made Saskatchewan politics a constant search for a party or a leader with a plan that can fulfil that mythical promise.
“Of course, the reality is there is no magic bullet that will transform Saskatchewan into something it is not,” Eisler said.
“There are policies and projects that work to make incremental progress and on many levels. They have made Saskatchewan a great success. They just don’t live up to the exaggerated promise.”
