The People’s Province

Populism has fuelled Fascist and Communist governments and every brand of authoritarian regime in between. And while populist leaders have always pitted the people against the elites, figuring out which is which has not always been easy. There has been no such confusion in Saskatchewan. Indeed, in the long, murky history of populist movements, there should be a special chapter set aside for the Land of the Living Skies.

Even before Saskatchewan became a province in 1905, the people who lived there were bathed in a profound sense of grievance that the federal government, the banks, the grain companies — indeed, almost everyone was against them. The extraordinary thing about the province, however, is that in the past fifty years it has remade itself from a society with collectivist inclinations into one that is centre-right in most of its policies. As Dale Eisler tells it in From Left to Right: Saskatchewan’s Political and Economic Transformation, this hasn’t...