A Look Back: Saskatchewan’s Experiment in Donor-Driven Government

How the early days of Brad Wall’s government and their economic “miracle” plan undermined democratic accountability, pretty much from day one.

The “A Look Back” series, for paid subscribers, captures the the moments, personalities, and controversies that have shaped Saskatchewan’s 21st-century history and have stuck with me across two decades immersed in Saskatchewan politics.

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Enterprise Saskatchewan.

From the moment Brad Wall took hold of the reins of the Sask Party in 2004, years before he formed government, he was pimping the shiny new engine of a “Saskatchewan First” economic miracle to whoever would listen.

It was, in practice, something far more corrosive: an experiment in handing the levers of public power to a hand‑picked cadre of unelected businesspeople, many of whom had already demonstrated their loyalty the old‑fashioned way - by writing cheques to the Saskatchewan Party.

Enterprise Saskatchewan was not just a flawed model. It was an affront to democratic governance, wrapped in the language of modernity and common sense.

Economic development, we were told, was too important to be left to partisan politicians and lumbering bureaucrats. The solution, according to one of Wall’s dramatic soliloquies from the Legislative floor during a debate introducing The Enterprise Saskatchewan Act, was to “depoliticize” economic development by creating an arm’s‑length board and a network of sector teams dominated by business leaders and private “experts.”

If that sounds suspiciously like outsourcing government to the same unelected people running the Saskatchewan Party government today, that’s because it was.