Parties & Leaders

Brad Wall

Swift Current [ Saskatchewan Party ]

After many hours on the practice field and some pre-season action, football fan and Saskatchewan Party Leader Brad Wall is finally getting his chance to go for the big trophy — forming a government.

His playbook on the campaign trail will no doubt contain a number of lessons from the last two general elections; 1999 and 2003 were both cliffhangers where the Saskatchewan Party under former leader Elwin Hermanson had strong showings, but failed to topple the governing NDP.

Soon after the 2003 loss, Hermanson announced he'd be stepping down as leader. Wall ran unopposed for the leadership and took over the reins of the party a year later.

Before politics

Born in Swift Current in 1965, the University of Saskatchewan graduate's resumé includes a number of activities outside the legislature. He was once Swift Current's director of business development, and managed the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame museum. He also started a tourism-related business.

Still, Wall, 41, who has three children with his wife Tami, has been involved in politics for much of his adult life. He began as an assistant to Progressive Conservative cabinet ministers Graham Taylor and John Gerich during the Grant Devine years, a connection the NDP would later repeatedly try to use against him.

His first attempt at running for office was for the PCs in Swift Current, in the 1991 election that would return the NDP to power. Wall lost that race, but had better luck running as a Saskatchewan Party candidate in 1999, defeating the NDP's John Wall (no relation).

Winning 25 seats in that election was considered by some observers as an extraordinary accomplishment for a party that had been created less than three years earlier following the merger of four Liberal MLAs and four Progressive Conservative MLAs.

In 1999, the Saskatchewan Party wasn't able to oust NDP Premier Roy Romanow from his office (despite being in a minority government position, the NDP forged a coalition with the Liberals and clung to power), but it did win the contest for the popular vote.

Coming close in 2003

That wasn't repeated in 2003 election, with the New Democrats getting more votes than the Saskatchewan Party as well as its two-seat majority. Many saw Hermanson's musings on the campaign trail about selling Crown corporations as a turning point in the 2003 campaign.

Wall has since declared that a Saskatchewan Party government wouldn't touch the Crowns.

Nevertheless, the issue of privatizing provincially owned enterprises has remained an exceedingly sensitive one for the party. When one of his MLAs, Dan D'Autremont, recently talked about winding down burglar alarm company SecurTek, an arm of SaskTel, because it competed with the private sector, Wall was quick to say that wasn't the policy at all.

Wall hasn't seen any challenges to his leadership, although one of his MLAs — Weyburn-Big Muddy's Brenda Bakken Lackey — stepped down, saying little about why except to suggest she was having trouble bringing her constituents' concerns forward.

With Wall at the helm, the Saskatchewan Party has stepped up attacks on how the NDP is managing health care. During question period, the Opposition has focused on waiting lists for cancer treatment. It has also focused on jobs and the economy, repeatedly blaming the long-term exodus of young people from Saskatchewan on NDP policies.

It has asked dozens of questions on the case of Murdoch Carriere, the fired provincial government manager who was convicted of assaulting two of his own employees and who received a $275,000 settlement. It has also raised a 15-year-old case of a former NDP caucus employee who inflated her own pay cheques, allegedly helping herself to thousands of dollars of public funds she wasn't entitled to. In the fallout from that debate, the police became involved, a senior NDP staffer resigned and a cabinet minister, Glenn Hagel, stepped down.

A move toward the centre

A number of academics and media observers have noted Wall's Saskatchewan Party was originally right of centre on the political spectrum, but has moved toward the centre in recent years.

Wall, however, has resisted such characterizations, calling the Saskatchewan Party a mainstream party.

The right-left distinction has been further blurred as some policies that were once the domain of the Saskatchewan Party, such as calls for major cuts to personal and corporate taxes, have been embraced by the NDP since 2003.

The Saskatchewan Party, meanwhile, has changed direction on the controversial TILMA interprovincial trade deal. A year ago, Wall was urging the NDP government to show more enthusiasm for the agreement that Alberta and B.C. had already signed. Later, Wall said his party had decided TILMA, which allows a freer flow of jobs and commerce across interprovincial lines, was a bad idea after all because it might hurt the Crowns.

In social policy, there has been moderation in Saskatchewan Party policies, too. The Saskatchewan Party once supported sending young offenders to "boot camp," a proposal that didn't catch fire with the public and has been quietly dropped.

The NDP says Wall's voter-friendly policies are a recent development and in TV commercials has literally portrayed the Saskatchewan Party as a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Football in hand

Wall's response has been to try to reassure voters that they're not "scary" and to accuse the NDP of being fearmongers.

That was the theme of a recent TV commercial showing a casually dressed Wall with a football in his hand at his son's football practice.

Will a new quarterback make the difference for the Saskatchewan Party in 2007? Saskatchewan is about to find out.

The CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites. External links will open in a new window.