NDP taking advantage of premier’s mistrust on privatization

That the NDP Opposition and unions are now screaming bloody murder because the Saskatchewan Party government is weighing the same privatization options for Sasktel that the Roy Romanow NDP government was exploring 20 years ago.

Alas, it’s also the reality of Saskatchewan’s ever-irrational, three-decade-old privatization debate.

It was 17 years ago, in April 2000, when a soon-to-retire Romanow — having also just pulled off a third-term win that a large swath of the Saskatchewan electorate soon regretted handing him — was entertaining the notion of a private-sector partnership for SaskTel as the company was being hammered by new long-distance competition.

“We believe SaskTel must expand its business and look at partnering where it makes sense for the provision of improved services,” Romanow told the Star Phoenix, responding to rumours that Bell Canada and others were interested in taking an ownership stake in SaskTel.

There were no protests. There were no outcries of “lies” and “betrayal” from the unions.

In fact, selling the Crowns wouldn’t be an issue until the 2003 campaign, when then Sask. Party leader Elwin Hermanson said virtually the same thing — for the right price, he would consider privatization offers for SaskTel or any other Crowns. That comment likely cost the Sask. Party the 2003 campaign. It was also the incentive for NDP premier Lorne Calvert’s 2003 Crown Corporation Protection Act. That has now led to the controversy over Bill 40, which supposedly clarifies the definition of privatization as dispensing with more than 49 per cent of public Crown assets.

Yet it was OK for Romanow to say he would consider a partnership in which “some swapping or exchanging of shares was part and parcel of the payment process?”

Heck, as far back as 1996 Romanow made it clear that his government did not have an “ideological predisposition to simply clang the door shut on privatization.”

So where does current interim leader Trent Wotherspoon get off calling Premier Brad Wall a liar and a hypocrite for considering even less than what Romanow was musing about two decades ago?

Alas, it is here where a cup of myth, a cup of trust, a pinch of reality and a heaping of partisanship simmer into the toxic brew that is Saskatchewan’s Crown corporation privatization debate.

The simple truth be told, a New Democrat leader like Romanow musing about Crown partnerships or privatization is always going to be met with less public suspicion.

This isn’t exactly fair. Then again, it wasn’t necessarily fair of Economy Minister Jeremy Harrison to proclaim this week the new K+S Potash Legacy mine is the first new mine in 40 years since the NDP “chased out” the industry. Any potash mine expansion today is directly attributed to an exceedingly favourable royalty structure established by the NDP government more than a decade ago and carried on by the Wall government.

Nevertheless, the Allan Blakeney NDP government’s foray in the potash industry through the creation of then Crown Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan in the 1970s will forever be the overlay of any Saskatchewan political debate on why business investors can’t trust the NDP.

By the same token, the Grant Devine Progressive Conservatives’ eagerness haunts Wall to this day. Three decades after Romanow “drew the line in the sand” on at least the privatization of Sask Energy (at the time, the NDP equated it to the U.S. civil rights fight of the 1960s). Privatization remains a political rallying cry for the union-NDP left.

Admittedly, Wall, SaskTel Minister Dustin Duncan, SGI Minister Joe Hargrave et. al. haven’t exactly done themselves any favours by being less than forthright on what potential private investors they have met and who is lobbying on their behalf.

But as Romanow said two decades ago, isn’t it their job to look at any partnership arrangements?

In the ever-irrational debate over Crown corporations, such reason gets tossed out the window.