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That may be why he decided to give up politics after just one term; he’s too intellectually blunt. (Well, he didn’t give politics up entirely. He came back a couple decades later to be then-Premier Jim Prentice’s chief of staff.)

Percy is a fan of provincial sales taxes. Like most academic advocates of a PST, he sees them as a way to even out the boom-and-bust revenue cycles of our resource economy.

But as MacKinnon said, she and her panel are not allowed to go there.

The chair herself is something of a fiscal hawk. Yes, MacKinnon was a New Democrat. For all I know, she still is.

But when she was in office, she was from the old CCF tradition of Prairie socialism. Yes, she wanted a caring, generous public safety net, but not one that was so generous it required a lot of debt to sustain it. (Unlike our recently expelled New Democrats, who took over a province with just $17 billion worth of debt and in just four years set it on a course for nearly $100 billion.)

MacKinnon was Roy Romanow’s finance minister. And Romanow, it should be remembered, inherited a government with wildly out-of-control spending from former Tory Premier Grant Devine. At the time the Romanow government replaced Devine’s Progressive Conservatives in 1991, Saskatchewan was under threat of bankruptcy. Many of the province’s bonds were nearing junk status.

MacKinnon made a lot of tough choices – most notably the closing of more than 50 small, rural hospitals. Nonetheless, she was clear enough at explaining to ordinary voters the need for austerity that the Romanow government was re-elected after implementing her cuts.