Devine Rule in Saskatchewan

After four decades, some thoughts on hope and hardship

Tuesday, April 26 will be the 40th anniversary of the election of Grant Devine as Premier of Saskatchewan.

The comic book version of the story runs as follows:

Grant Devine won big 40 years ago. His Progressive Conservatives shocked Allan Blakeney’s NDP by winning 54 percent of the popular vote and 55 of 64 seats. Ten NDP candidates lost their deposits. Devine’s Conservatives won NDP urban strongholds such as Regina Rosemont, Regina Victoria, Saskatoon Riversdale and Saskatoon Westmount – ridings the NDP with more than 60 percent of the vote in 1978. The Conservatives demolished the ridings in CCF/NDP rural strongholds such as Biggar. “Red Square” turned blue. The Conservatives won 61 percent of the vote in Weyburn, the old home riding of Tommy Douglas.

Then it came undone for Devine. Saskatchewan ran massive deficits. Prices for commodities such as wheat, oil and potash collapsed. By 1991, the province was teetering on bankruptcy. The 1991 election was a debacle for the Conservatives. The party’s share of the popular vote plummeted to 25.5 percent and it elected only 10 members. Conservatives were wiped out in the province’s four largest cities. While the NDP was sweeping back into power, the Liberals were positioning themselves to become the opposition of the future, winning 23 percent of the popular vote. It was a worse defeat than the NDP had suffered in 1982 – at least after that one, the NDP was still seen as the alternative to the government.

Then it got even worse for the Progressive Conservatives in Saskatchewan. In 1995, the party was relegated third-party status. A seemingly endless parade of former Conservative MLA’s were charged with fraud. Devine himself won a federal Conservative nomination for the 1997 federal election but Conservative leader Jean Charest refused to sign his nomination papers. Devine’s reputation was that tainted. The handful of remaining Conservative MLA’s merged with half of the Liberal caucus to form the Saskatchewan Party. The NDP described it as the “Conservatives in a witness protection program” and got re-elected in 1999 and 2003 by running against the retired Grant Devine.

After forty decades, can we ask “what happened”?

Perhaps enough time has passed for an objective appraisal of Grant Devine’s record.

I’ll start by observing that I’m biased. During Devine’s second term, I worked for two NDP Members of the Legislature. I also co-edited one of the two contemporary books that vigorously criticized his record in government (Devine Rule in Saskatchewan: A Decade of Hope and Hardship - edited with Lesley Biggs). The other one was Privatizing a Province: The New Right in Saskatchewan by Jim Pitsula and Ken Rasmussen. Both books were pretty good, but Lesley and I had the cooler cover.

Other people worked as hard as I did to defeat Grant Devine’s government, but I don’t really think anyone worked harder.

In 2012, I decided to do a Masters degree. For my thesis, I examined the politics and economics of Saskatchewan’s two heavy oil upgraders: the NewGrade (Co-op) upgrader in Regina and the Bi-Provincial Upgrader in Lloydminster. Both were built during Devine’s terms in office. I sent Devine a letter asking for permission to gain access to his papers held by the Saskatchewan Archives Board. Given my past, I had no expectation that he would agree. To my shock, he immediately phoned to give a friendly, enthusiastic statement of permission. I had a little trouble converting his enthusiasm into the bureaucratic forms required by the Archives Board, so we met in Carenport to fill out appropriate papers. He immediately tried to sell me a horse. Now – I’m a city guy. I lived in an apartment. I’ve ridden a horse three times in my life and had three root canals. I’d rather have another root canal than go for another horse ride. Grant Devine seemed to really believe he had a chance of making a sale – and that I’d be thrilled with the horse he had picked out for me.

Devine’s papers were a researcher’s delight. He was a disorganized packrat. Everything went into his collection. Nothing was culled. He had the habit of writing comments on briefing notes, incoming correspondence, newspaper clippings and pretty much everything else. As a result, I was able to see his thought processes. I came across a copy of an article I had written for Briarpatch Magazine. Devine had underlined and circled some parts of the article. At the bottom, he had written “This guy is an asshole!!!” When I saw this in his files, I was delighted; even a bit honoured. I also had to admit that he was right. The article was pretty snarky.

Between my conversations with him and my examination of his papers, I came a conclusion: Grant Devine was not evil. He was just an optimist.

Personal Optimism and the Politics of the Devine Government

Evolutionary psychologists argue that optimism and pessimism are hard-wired into the human psyche. We need both. Optimism keeps us striving and taking risks. Pessimism keeps us alive. If we go back ten thousand generations, when our ancestors were wandering around the grasslands of central Africa, people had to interpret and respond to the sound of rustling grass. Those who heard rustling grass and thought “zebra” ate well. Those that heard rustling grass and thought “lion” were not as likely to get eaten. Grant Devine’s distant ancestors were those who thought “zebra” but were lucky enough never to encounter a lion. He is hard-wired for optimism.

Devine’s boundless optimism struck a chord with Saskatchewan voters. Premier Blakeney had been careful, methodical and competent; he was grounded in an understanding of Saskatchewan as a sparsely populated, land-locked province. Devine proclaimed, “There’s so much more we can be!” Voters loved it.

Optimism was great for a candidate, but can be problematic for a premier. Let’s look at two examples – heavy oil upgraders and the province’s overall financial picture.

Heavy oil upgraders were needed if Saskatchewan’s oil industry was to grow and prosper. The Blakeney government had been trying, unsuccessfully, to build one. (There was a time when the only political debate around the oil industry was about how to get more of it.) Devine caused two to be built at a time when oil prices and demand were low. Oil was getting about $12 per barrel. At that price, the upgraders would lose a ton of money. Devine, the optimist, believed oil prices would go up by the time construction was completed. At $40 or $50 per barrel, the upgraders make a ton of money. In the long term, Devine was right. The upgraders became hugely profitable. Unfortunately, “down” part of the cycle lasted about a decade longer than he expected, leaving the Romanow government with two massive financial sink-holes to manage.

When Devine became premier, US President Ronald Reagan and the Chair of the Federal Reserve Board, Paul Volcker were curbing inflation by using high interest rates to intentionally create a harsh recession. Devine, the optimist, proclaimed that “Saskatchewan has chosen not to participate”. He cut taxes and provided interest subsidies on mortgages to insulate Saskatchewan people from “Reagonomics”. To do so, he had to start borrowing money. A lot of money. Saskatchewan began to run big deficits. By the mid-1980s, the North American economy recovered and boomed…except in Saskatchewan. As the continental economy improved, the prices of our key export commodities such as wheat, oil and potash plummeted. Deficits got worse. The Devine government tried fiscal restraint in 1987 and 1988 before abandoning the effort. Another continental recession in the early 1990s was the final nail in the province’s fiscal coffin.

Grant Devine’s optimism guided the fiscal policies of his government. Hard, sustained restraint measures were pointless; in the long run, improved commodity prices would solve our fiscal problems. In the long run, he had a point. In Saskatchewan, hundred dollar a barrel oil makes provincial budgetting easy. John Maynard Keynes once observed, “in the long run, we are all dead.” In Saskatchewan’s case, it was the short and medium run that were the problem. Commodity prices did not improve until the late 1990s. Saskatchewan didn’t have the money or the borrowing capacity to get to Devine’s optimistic long run. This forced the Romanow government into the tough and unpleasant fiscal restraint program of its first term.

“TC is PC”

During the 1986 election campaign, Grant Devine’s wife, Chantel, proclaimed that “TC is PC”. The claim that the Progressive Conservative (PC) party had inherited the mantle of Thomas Clement Douglas (TC) drove old-time CCF’ers incandescent with rage. The NDP was the linear descendent of the Douglas government. The memory of “TC” or “Tommy” was sacred.

In a way, however, Chantel Devine was right.

The Douglas government was based in rural Saskatchewan. Smaller family-owned farms and people living in small towns voted for TC. He, in turn, made massive investments in rural Saskatchewan: rural electrification, improved roads, telecommunications infrastructure, new schools and hospitals. So too did the Devine government. It made massive investments in new schools, hospitals, farm service centers – not to mention wrangling billions in direct financial support out of the federal government for farmers. One direct connection between the Douglas and Devine governments was the provision of energy to farms: a celebrated accomplishment of Douglas was rural electrification. Devine followed this up with the delivery of natural gas to thousands of farms.

But there was a key difference.

During the Douglas years, the rural economy of small farmers and small towns was still viable. Douglas invested to improve the living conditions for rural people. By the 1980s, things had changed. Larger, more expensive, farm equipment and rail line abandonment were destroying the viability of smaller farms. Some of the successes of the Douglas government contributed, in the long term, to the withering away of small towns; improved roads made it easier for people to travel to larger towns to shop and deliver their grain; small towns and villages withered and died. Improvements to Saskatchewan’s education system had made it possible for Saskatchewan’s youth to seek their fortune under the bright lights of Calgary and Toronto. For many Saskatchewan young people, happiness was their home town in the rear-view mirror. By the 1980s, the small-farm, small-town way of life improved by Douglas was slowly but inexorably getting killed by impersonal market forces. Grant Devine made a valiant, optimistic effort to stop this process. By the end, the effort degenerated into the ill-conceived and ill-fated Operation Fair Share. Just as Johnny Appleseed planted apple trees across the rural landscape, Grant Devine attempted to grow small-town prosperity by planting civil servants along a hundred Main Streets. To steal a line from William F. Buckley Jr., Devine’s investments in rural Saskatchewan were an attempt to stand in the course of history and yell, “stop.” Devine was like King Canute ordering the market-force tides to stop. His optimism made him think he could pull it off.

The result was ironic. The incoming tides of cold, impersonal market forces washed away the dykes that Grant Devine was valiantly trying to build. When these tides receded, it was the traditional base of the CCF/NDP that washed away. The small farmers and small towns disappeared. Those who belonged to the National Farmers Union, supported the Wheat Pool and voted NDP were gone. Grant Devine had tried to preserve their natural eco-system. It was his failure, rather than his successes, that turned rural Saskatchewan true-blue conservative.

Nut-picking and Opposition to the Devine Government

During the last half of the 1980s, the NDP was good at opposition. We were rough, tough, energetic and nasty. We practiced what the American political commentator David French has described as “nut-picking”; selecting the stupidest actions of the worst nuts in the ranks of your opponents and portraying them as representative.

We did more than nut-pick. We also “mean bastard-picked” and we “sleazy bugger-picked”. In this, we were helped by Grant Devine’s optimism. He believed the people around him were intrinsically good. He was not paranoid and suspicious enough to be a good premier. For those of us in the opposition, this meant we were like mosquitos in a nudist colony. It was a target-rich environment. We picked out the nuts, mean bastards and sleazy buggers. We lovingly (sic) built their profiles. Many of them were stupid and egotistical enough to help us out. The result was that the government as a whole came to be viewed as nutty, mean and sleazy. This image eventually attached itself to the person of Grant Devine, even though he – personally - was not nutty, mean or sleazy. His optimistic view of human nature made it possible for us to tarnish his good name.

Cancel Culture and Grant Devine as Premier

After Grant Devine gave up on trying to sell me a horse, he told me why he went into politics.

In the mid-1970’s, he had a freshly minted Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics and had been hired to teach at the University of Saskatchewan. Part of his job was teaching extension classes in rural Saskatchewan. In his teaching, he challenged the Saskatchewan orthodoxy of the Crow Rate, supply management and orderly marketing. In his words, he was “free enterprise”. This caused pushback. Some senior leaders in the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool approached U of S President Leo Kristjanson and Agriculture College Dean Jake Brown to demand that Devine be fired. The demand was rebuffed, but Dean Brown told Devine to “tone it down” until he got tenure.

Devine was distressed. When he told Chantel about the request, she said that it would not work – that the man she married was incapable of being shushed up and that’s the way she liked him. Devine responded by saying they’d probably have to move. Again, Chantel pushed back. After his grad school and work for the federal government, she was tired of moving. She was back in Saskatchewan and wanted to stay. Devine reports that he was puzzled. If he couldn’t shush up and he couldn’t leave, what options were there? His wife said “fight”. So, he did. The 1978 election was coming up. Devine ran for the Conservatives. He lost, but his performance propelled him into the party leadership. He became premier a few years later.

Grant Devine got into politics because of cancel culture. If the leadership of the Wheat Pool (remember that?) had been willing to accept the free, diverse expression of opinion, he’d probably have happily spent three or four decades in the classroom. For what its worth, I think his boundless enthusiasm, humanity and optimism would have made him a really good person to take a class from.

A final note on Grant Devine as Premier

I continue to believe that Grant Devine was a pretty bad premier. He was too nice a guy for the job. His optimism needed to be tempered with a little more pessimism. A few of the people in his administration were allowed to do some bad things and the province was essentially bankrupted. Roy Romanow and his team inherited a big mess to clean up. All of this being said, it is churlish and conveniently hypocritical to blame it all on him.

The simple fact of the matter is that the people of Saskatchewan elected him to the office of Premier. Twice.

In 1982, Grant Devine ran on a platform of “there’s so much more we can be” and a bunch of promises about tax cuts and expenditure increases. Allan Blakeney argued that we needed to be cautiously realistic in our dreams and that we could not afford the promises. Factually, Blakeney was right but people voted for optimism instead of realism. As a province, we got exactly what we voted for. And then, when it all turned sour, when the lion burst out of the long grass, Saskatchewan voters sanctimoniously said it was all his fault.

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