Elwin Hermanson, leader of the Saskatchewan Party

For the leader of the Saskatchewan Party, this campaign's greatest challenge may be to calm voter fears about his party's agenda long enough to get himself elected.

Elwin Hermanson has made no bones about what will happen to the province's 80 or so Crown corporations if he wins: he's promised to review them all, kill or privatize the ones that he thinks are underperformers, then refocus the ones that remain toward their “core” responsibilities. This in itself is a frightening proposition for the many voters whose incomes depend on those government-run companies.

Scarier still for many provincial employees was the revelation, just days before the campaign began, that his party has made a list of some 2,000 government workers with ties to the governing New Democrats. Hermanson denied any ill intent, but the NDP called it proof that many of those people could lose their jobs in a post-election purge by a victorious Saskatchewan Party.

Nonetheless, pre-election polls suggest that the party's prospects have never been brighter.

So who is this leader, who has intimidated some voters but convinced so many more that he's the right man for the times?

Hermanson was born and raised near Beechy, on a family farm that he still runs. He and his wife, Gail, have three children: Marlyn, who recently graduated from high school; Byron, 21, who helps run the family farm; and Ehren, 23, who attends the College of Commerce at the University of Saskatchewan.

Like NDP Leader Lorne Calvert, Hermanson has strong religious ties, serving on the board of the Full Gospel Bible Institute in Eston. A Reform Party candidate, he was elected to the House of Commons in 1993 as the member for Kindersley-Lloydminster, where he served as the party's House Leader and agriculture critic.

But while Hermanson was enjoying success in Ottawa, things were going badly back at home. The Tory government of former premier Grant Devine imploded in a corruption scandal, leaving the Conservative Party unelectable and creating a void on the right of Saskatchewan's political spectrum. With nowhere else to turn, a coalition of former Tories, right-leaning Liberals and Reformers founded the Saskatchewan Party in 1997, and Hermanson came home from Ottawa, winning the leadership of the fledgling party in 1998.

In his maiden campaign in 1999, Hermanson came tantalizingly close to power. Although the Saskatchewan Party only won 26 of the Legislature's 58 seats, its candidates actually received more votes than the victorious New Democrats did.

This being his second time out, Hermanson may be at the crossroads of his political career: the leaders of political parties in Canada usually lose their jobs after two election defeats. To make sure that doesn't happen, Hermanson will attempt to build on the Saskatchewan Party's solid base in the province's rural ridings.

The charm offensive on urban voters is expected to focus on Saskatoon, where the party's support trails that for the New Democrats by just four per cent. Its platform has three significant planks: Hermanson's insistence on not catering to one geographical or ethnic sector at the expense of others, an attack on wasteful spending by the NDP government, and a plan to increase Saskatchewan's population by 100,000 within a decade. The latter one could become particularly powerful in a province that has lost about one per cent of its population in the last 10 years.

But Hermanson will have to walk a fine line to pull it off. He needs to scare voters - about the way the NDP has spent public funds, about the effects of declining population - without appearing threatening himself. A recent auditor's report will provide him with ammunition, but the Saskatchewan Party's success depends on how carefully he fires it.

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