Blakeney; a man of reason

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/04/2011 (5364 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is a measure of the breadth of his achievements that half a century after then-health minister Allan Blakeney stickhandled medicare past Saskatchewan’s doctors, the health-care issue continues to dominate Canadian politics. Only now, rather than a battle over implementation, politicians of all stripes fight fiercely to promote their particular strategy to save it.

And potash, which he nationalized in 1976, is now considered of strategic interest to the entire country and also remains a dominant issue in provincial and federal politics. While Mr. Blakeney considered, even in his final days, universally available and publicly funded health care as his biggest achievement, it certainly wasn’t his only significant contribution to Canada and his adopted province.

These included battling for provincial rights over resources, adapting the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to guarantee the power of elected assemblies, and imparting on the national psyche the need to balance fiscal responsibility with caring for the disadvantaged.

It’s a measure of his dedication to public service that, long after he retired from politics after serving as premier from 1971 to 1982, Mr. Blakeney continued to teach at both Osgoode Hall at York University, and at the University of Saskatchewan.

But it wasn’t just in these formal settings that the post-political Mr. Blakeney made his eclectic positions known and understood.

He pulled out of the Aboriginal Peoples’ Commission, created by the Mulroney government, because he felt its mandate was too broad to deal with native issues effectively. And he judiciously wrote analysis pieces for national newspapers and on these pages, whenever he felt an issue required greater public discourse.

Judicious, he was reluctant to use his history and acclaim as instruments to interfere with the current political discourse. That he would contribute to the pages of Saskatchewan’s major dailies in itself is remarkable, considering how strident and often bitter the battle was over medicare, and how often Mr. Blakeney was the target of editorials and commentary.

But, while Mr. Blakeney unquestionably at times could be partisan, his philosophy of public service was a calling that was above the fray.

He was attracted to Saskatchewan from his native Nova Scotia by his belief that in this new western home was an administration that epitomized public service. His political career was forged at a time when former U.S. president John Kennedy exhorted Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

As Roy Romanow, his successor as NDP leader, said in an interview this week, Mr. Blakeney approached even the most controversial of issues in a calm, cerebral and deliberate fashion. It was a style that allowed the premier of a relatively small province to hold his own at the national level. Mr. Romanow noted that Mr. Blakeney was considered the only premier capable of going head-to-head with former prime minister Pierre Trudeau.

Those who followed the long and bitter debates leading up to the patriation of the Constitution, and particularly the battle for provincial rights, must concede Mr. Blakeney gave better than he got.

In his book, An Honourable Calling, Mr. Blakeney detailed several innovative initiatives taken by his administration — from the creation of a single agency to deal with northern Saskatchewan, to the establishment of the land bank, the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan and the Saskatchewan Oil and Gas Corporation, to a universal children’s dental health plan and a provincial prescription drug plan.

All done while Saskatchewan remained one of the few jurisdictions to continually balance its books.

Some have pointed to Mr. Blakeney’s decade in power as a time when governments tried to do too much. Certainly that age seems to have passed. But as Ken Rasmussen, the associate director of the Johnson-Shoyama graduate school of public policy pointed out a year ago, it’s worth remembering that Mr. Blakeney was only putting in place the services people demanded.

While the loss of many of the programs he championed might lead one to believe his contributions were transient, nothing could be further from the truth. As he wrote in An Honourable Calling, “I am not upset when an idea that I championed has served its purpose and passed from the scene.

“I am not very upset when an idea I’ve championed is discarded in favour of another approach which someone feels will work better.

“I am upset when changes are made which don’t make any sound business or government sense but, rather, are made on ideological grounds.”

In spite of the survival rate of his policies, it is this call to reason that must be Mr. Blakeney’s greatest legacy.