Oh, Gens du Saskatchewan

What would a reincarnated Charles de Gaulle be saying if he was visiting Canada in these touchy times?

Vive le Saskatchewan!

Vive le Saskatchewan libre!

If nothing else, Premier Scott “Let-My-People-Go” Moe’s recent fever dream of nationhood for his prairie province (some might call it a fit of Justin Trudeau-bashing, or wheedling for increased federal munificence) offers the political commentariat, not to mention open-mic comedians from coast to coast to coast, plenty of fodder.

“This government in Saskatchewan is going to do everything that we can to expand our autonomy within the nation of Canada,” Moe told reporters.

A “nation within a nation,” he said of his chilly patch in big sky country.

And if some condescending central Canadians perhaps greeted the news by asking, “who’s Scott Moe?” prairie heads — well, a few, surely — likely bobbed like so many nodding donkeys from the western oil wells at the stirring cri de coeur.

Not since the issuance in 2020 of the Buffalo Declaration (that extraordinary manifesto of Western Canadian grievance and threat) has the blood coursed so thrillingly through the more aggrieved right-wing portions of the body politic.

Still, Scott “Free-at-last” Moe is not alone in thinking his jurisdiction a place apart.

“It seemed to us that Saskatchewan is perhaps the mythic core of the country,” Ken Dryden and Roy MacGregor once wrote in “Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada.” “It’s the land of wide open spaces and winter and snow and ice and not many people.”

That old English lit professor Edward McCourt from the University of Saskatchewan once said: “Silence and solitude — the finest gifts Saskatchewan has to offer bedevilled modern man.”

And no less a Canadian worthy than Stephen Leacock, who could divine the soul of a place at a glance, suggested Saskatchewan was the direct handiwork of the divine.

“The Lord said, ‘Let there be wheat!’ and Saskatchewan was born.”

Is Saskatchewan a distinct society?

One hardly needs to ask. Does any other province have the surgical linearity of a jurisdiction with no natural borders? Is any other province so regular in shape that even a grade schooler can draw it?

Wasn’t it Saskatchewan that was home to the Canadian sitcom “Corner Gas,” set in Dog River, 40 miles from nowhere? And

“Little Mosque on the Prairie?”

This is the province that gave a grateful nation Gordie Howe and Johnny Bower and Rowdy Roddy Piper.

Je me souviens! bellows Scott Moe, figuratively speaking. The premier is apparently fed up to his frostbitten earlobes with being taken for granted and with grave insults being casually tossed at the proud nation of Saskatchewan.

“Saskatchewan is the only place I’m tired of without ever having seen it,” the English writer J.B. Priestley once said.

As if English writers ever had anything to say worth listening to. Now, some critics might say — but scoffers would, wouldn’t they? — that Saskatchewan was truly distinct during the 20th century when it tilted left, when it gave Canada the Regina Manifesto, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and when Tommy Douglas was inventing medicare.

Ever since the prosperity provided by potash and uranium, oil and gas resulted in its decided tilt right, Saskatchewan has became increasingly indistinguishable from other provinces in its blustery self-regard.

Still, we hear Scott Moe.

And in the event he needs an anthem to call his own any time soon, we suggest the folk song “Saskatchewan,” included by Edith Fowke and Alan Mills in “Canada’s Story in Song.”

“Saskatchewan, the land of snow,/Where winds are always on the blow,/Where people sit with frozen toes,/And why we stay here no one knows.”

Not Gens du Pays, perhaps. But catchy.