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The Saskatchewan Party was founded to replace a Progressive Conservative party which had been tarnished beyond repair. And so it has spent virtually its entire existence trying to avoid comparisons to the PCs — including by claiming that it had learned better than the party which supplied its base.

But as Brad Wall’s tenure as anything more than a caretaker premier comes to an end, he doesn’t seem to have recognized what should have been the most important lessons from Devine’s stay in power.

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Wall claimed to acknowledge the problems with Devine’s accumulation of debt through reckless tax cuts and unsustainable political promises. But he then repeated the cycle, spending down the province’s reserves even in the midst of a boom — and is now abandoning his post just as important decisions need to be made to repair his damage to Saskatchewan’s public finances.

Wall promised through multiple election cycles to avoid Devine-style selloffs of our Crown investments. But by his last term in office, he introduced multiple pieces of legislation to undermine protections for Crowns while presiding over active efforts to “partner” with the corporate sector.

And Wall desperately resisted any comparison to Devine’s ethically-challenged governing party. But at the end of his time as premier, he had gone out of his way to compliment one of his own MLAs who he’d already had to warn about misusing his public office for personal gain.