Wrap up of fall session.

REGINA — The fall sitting of the legislative assembly ends Thursday and Premier Brad Wall says the government used the time to begin work on its growth plan, while the NDP Opposition says it revealed problems with the Sask. Party’s approach.

“We started just before session by announcing our growth plan for the province and acknowledging that Saskatchewan’s growing in unprecedented ways and government needed to do what it could to help facilitate continued growth, but that we also need to deal with the challenges of growth and those are about infrastructure and those are about our labour shortage and those are about housing issues,” Wall told reporters Wednesday.

“Not just in this particu- lar session, the fall and the spring, but we need to continue to address these particular issues,” he added. “I think you’ll see these will be also the theme of the budget when it’s tabled in the legislature in the spring.”

Provincial NDP interim leader John Nilson told reporters Wednesday that the NDP is “feeling somewhat bittersweet coming to the end because we worked well together as a team and we raised some very serious issues about this government and where it’s going. Tomorrow we’ll be capping all of that off.

“We’ve always been concerned about the finances of the government and the auditor’s report this week confirmed many of the questions that we’ve been asking,” he said.

But Wall said revenues exceeded expenditures, noting Saskatchewan is “the only place in Canada like that.”

He said the fall sitting “highlighted the fact that the legislature can also work on things in a nonpartisan fashion, which is important,” singling out the NDP’s Cam Broten for his “good exchanges” around ideas.

“I don’t think you have to necessarily have a lot of members to be effective,” Wall said about his party’s large number of MLAs compared to the NDP’s nine. “It depends on the issues that you’re raising and I think that was manifest in this particular fall sitting. It’s the way the legislature should work.”

The next time a sitting concludes, the New Democrats are expected to have elected a new leader, with a leadership convention scheduled for March. Nilson thanked the party’s team and supporters for their efforts with him at the helm.