Wall may be Canada’s most successful politician

Let me be the first to propose the silly-but-I-sort-of-half-believe-it theory of Brad Wall’s retirement from politics. It is, perhaps at least partly, about his son’s music career. Wall’s kid Colter (you’ll notice that classic Western Hockey League first name) is a talented country singersongwriter whose first full LP came out this summer. He is on a pretty clear path to American stardom, and the “songwriter” part of his resume is a potential gold mine (potash deposit?) in a time that has made it difficult to profit from physical records.

But Colter Wall had the bad luck of releasing the album just as his father was subjecting the province of Saskatchewan to an austere between-elections budget that butchered sacred oxen by the hecatomb. This made Colter an attractive hostage for political critics and social-media lice in Western Canada. Surely it made being premier of Saskatchewan about 50 per cent less fun for Brad Wall than usual.

Wall senior may be the most successful Canadian politician alive, period, and he has meaningful experience of private business: there will be no shortage of career options. He can easily make twice the income he does now, or 10 times, and lift the inherited target off the back of his son’s fringed buckskin jacket. Call me crazy … unless Wall confirms my idea later, that is.

What legacy does Brad Wall leave? He broke the back of the New Democratic Party in Saskatchewan, and that is no small thing. Other “conservatives” had tried to tackle the power of the socialist government-Crown-corplabour spider’s web woven by Tommy Douglas and his successors. All bungled the job, despite the obvious strength of the potential right-wing vote in the province’s hinterland. Wall had to complete the creation of an anti-socialist alternative in Saskatchewan, unite it behind him, and out-campaign a political machine that was in the hands of its third generation.

Only a figure of singular insight, intuition, and craft could have pulled this off. Wall was the first really talented Saskatchewan politician to be reared outside the NDP greenhouse in generations, and although the Saskatchewan Party now has the advantages of incumbency, it may be a while before it finds another leader of Wall’s calibre. He did it by inventing an indigenously Saskatchewanian conservatism — an ideology one could almost call Wallism. He came into office declaring that “Crown (corporation)s are not going to be privatized,” and stuck almost entirely to that pledge. The province held its core publicly owned institutions — SaskTel, SaskPower, the insurer SGI — but Wall’s government made greater use of publicprivate partnerships to build infrastructure, got rid of some penny-ante government-owned share holdings and small businesses, and let the private sector obtrude gently into management in settings like health care and provincial parks.

In short, he acted like a sincere privatizer who accepts the existence of powerful political taboos he cannot change, rather than quarrelling with and grumbling at them. The reaction to recent moves to bring private capital into SaskTel may be another reason that this is a good time for Wall to find the exit: the premier might have accidentally weakened the faith of the Saskatchewan voter, who is accustomed to the comforting presence of Crowns in the economy, and breathed new life into the New Democrats’ unceasing talk of a “hidden privatization agenda.”

Wallism was also noticeably hostile to the neoliberal vision of international free trade. He raged against the BHP Billiton’s attempted takeover of PotashCorp (persuading the federal government to prevent shareholders from cashing out at a market peak) and forbade pension plans from buying Saskatchewan farmland. In both cases Wall was reducing the value of Saskatchewan assets — in the latter case, making much of Saskatchewan itself less valuable on the market.

But in both cases, Wall had the Saskatchewan citizenry unquestionably behind him. For a politician who needs to win a sequence of elections to establish his party as a permanent force, these were probably pretty easy decisions.

If this is conservatism, it is conservatism of an antique nationalist flavour — a protectionist conservatism that goes for low taxes, and is averse to social-engineering projects like gun registration and carbon pricing, but one that also mythologizes the family farm and accepts a large role for the state in the control of utilities and resources. Something like this may be the old-school future of Canadian or even international conservatism, and if it is, Wall will be recognized as a pioneer. (Teaching Wallism could easily be what he does in his later years.)

What impressed me most about Wall was not his policies; in some ways he was a more timid economic reformer than some NDP forerunners. Perhaps because I am a child of the Saskatchewan diaspora, what I noticed about Wall was the eloquent way he exploited Saskatchewan’s inherent resentment of its alluring neighbour Alberta. Young people had been fleeing, nay, pouring westward from Saskatchewan for 50 years when Wall became party leader in 2004.

The record shows that his government reversed the tide of interprovincial “brain drain,” though Saskatchewan, with oil prices low and the public treasury under stress, is gradually beginning to lose out again. Partly this was luck: commodity prices did well for the early Brad Wall, and housing affordability has become a selling point for Regina, Saskatoon, and even smaller Saskatchewan communities.

But I think part of it is that Wall was consciously determined to transform Saskatchewan into something more than a place everybody comes from. In his speechmaking he said an explicit “No” to permanent decline, and he not-so-subtly associated that decline in the voters’ minds with New Democratic government. It gave him a decade of power, and perhaps he could have had more.

MAY BE THE MOST SUCCESSFUL CANADIAN POLITICIAN ALIVE.