When Brad Wall swept to power in November 2007, Saskatchewan was experiencing an economic revival unseen since the post-war years. Commodity prices were soaring, people were moving to the province rather than away from it, and the Premier-elect seemed to embody a new, optimistic chapter in Saskatchewan’s story. A decade later, when Wall announced his retirement in August 2017, the province he left behind was a more complicated place.
The Boom Years
The first term of Wall’s Saskatchewan Party government coincided with extraordinary commodity prices. Potash and oil drove provincial revenues to record highs. Saskatchewan’s population, long stagnant or declining as residents left for Alberta or British Columbia, began to grow. Regina and Saskatoon experienced housing construction booms, labour shortages, and the unfamiliar feeling of being destinations rather than departure points. The province recorded its lowest unemployment rates in decades.
Wall and his government took credit for the economic environment, not unreasonably given that investor confidence, a stable regulatory framework, and some genuine administrative competence contributed to attracting capital. They cut personal income taxes, eliminated the provincial capital tax, and projected an image of fiscal responsibility that contrasted with the Devine-era scandals of the early 1990s that had left permanent marks on conservative politics in the province.
Royalty Disputes and Resource Nationalism
Not every chapter of the boom years was straightforward. The government’s handling of potash royalty rates became contentious, with critics arguing that the province was collecting far less revenue per tonne than comparable jurisdictions and that the royalty structure had not been adequately updated to reflect the extraordinary price environment. The debate about whether Saskatchewan was capturing its fair share of resource wealth echoed arguments that had defined provincial politics since the 1970s, and it was never fully resolved on Wall’s watch.
The 2010 blocking of the BHP Billiton takeover bid for Potash Corporation was the high-water mark of Wall’s resource nationalism — a moment when the traditionally business-friendly Saskatchewan Party Premier positioned himself as a defender of provincial economic sovereignty against foreign corporate interests. The episode demonstrated that resource politics in Saskatchewan does not divide neatly along conventional left-right lines.
The Bust and Its Consequences
Oil prices collapsed in 2014 and 2015, pulling provincial revenues down sharply. Potash prices had already softened from their 2008 peak. The Saskatchewan government, having structured its budgets around commodity-dependent revenues, found itself recording deficits for the first time in years. The Wall government responded with a combination of spending restraint and accounting adjustments that its critics characterised as insufficient and, in some cases, misleading about the true fiscal position.
The 2017 provincial budget introduced a provincial sales tax increase from five percent to six percent, a decision that drew significant criticism even from within the party’s own coalition. The contrast with the boom-time tax-cutting rhetoric was stark. Rural municipalities and school divisions complained about funding cuts. The sense of effortless prosperity that had characterised the early Wall years had dissipated.
The Carbon Tax Fight
Wall’s final major political fight was against the federal Liberal government’s carbon pricing policy. He argued strenuously that a carbon tax was economically punitive for a province whose economy depended on agriculture, oil extraction, and long driving distances — sectors where emissions reduction was technically difficult and where the costs of pricing carbon would fall disproportionately on Saskatchewan residents. His position resonated domestically even as it placed him at odds with most provincial premiers and the national environmental consensus.
The Wikipedia biography of Brad Wall captures the central paradox of his tenure: a Premier who presided over extraordinary economic growth largely driven by factors outside any government’s control, who claimed credit for the upswing and governed competently enough to retain public confidence through the downturn, but who left office having not resolved the structural question of how a commodity-dependent province builds sustainable public finances for the long term. That question, as the CBC Saskatchewan coverage of subsequent budgets has documented, remains unresolved.