Little difference between Wall and Devine

Sask. Party has repeated errors of its PC antecedent

The Saskatchewan Party was founded to replace a Progressive Conservative party that had been tarnished beyond repair. And so it has spent virtually its entire existence trying to avoid comparisons to the PCs — including by claiming that it had learned better than the party that supplied its base.

But as Brad Wall’s tenure as anything more than a caretaker premier comes to an end, he doesn’t seem to have recognized what should have been the most important lessons from Grant Devine’s stay in power.

Wall claimed to acknowledge the problems with Devine’s accumulation of debt through reckless tax cuts and unsustainable political promises.

But he then repeated the cycle, spending down the province’s reserves even in the midst of a boom — and is now abandoning his post just as important decisions need to be made to repair his damage to Saskatchewan’s public finances.

Wall promised through multiple election cycles to avoid Devine-style sell-offs of our Crown investments.

But by his last term in office, he introduced multiple pieces of legislation to undermine protections for Crowns while presiding over active efforts to “partner” with the corporate sector.

And Wall desperately resisted any comparison to Devine’s ethically challenged governing party. But at the end of his time as premier, he had gone out of his way to compliment one of his own MLAs who he’d already had to warn about misusing his public office for personal gain.

Now, whether further revelations about the Global Transportation Hub and other Saskatchewan Party scandals surface through a judicial inquiry or through other types of investigation, there looks to be plenty more misuse of power yet to surface.

And the amount left to discover is due in no small part to the Saskatchewan Party’s concealment of information and refusal to allow for meaningful investigation through legislative committees.

With most of his past attempts to distinguish himself from Devine having thus fallen by the wayside, Wall’s eventual decision to appoint Devine to the University of Saskatchewan’s board of governors seems aimed at setting a precedent that will help himself and his partymates in the future.

No matter how many poor decisions a conservative politician makes or how many ethical violations are committed under his command, he’ll always have a place among the patronage selections of the next like-minded premier — even if a party has had to shed its skin to take power again. And Devine’s public statements after receiving his appointment make clear that reflection and self-awareness aren’t preconditions to being brought back into the conservative club.

Mind you, it remains to be seen whether the Saskatchewan Party will go the way of the PCs. And the lessons that Wall does seem to have drawn from his former party are ones primarily related to image and brand management: to prioritize public relations over governance at every turn, and to seek a way out of office before even his staunchest supporters are sick of defending him (rather than clinging to power by every conceivable means as Devine did).

Depending on what we find out about the Saskatchewan Party’s actions while in power, that focus may yet allow Wall to preserve more political capital arising out of his time as premier than Devine was able to salvage. At the very least, it would be a surprise for Wall to be rejected as a candidate if he sought to resume his political career.

But when it comes to the effect on Saskatchewan of their respective tenures in power, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Wall and the mentor his party tried to bury in the past.