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“I expect as much noise and bell-ringing and hollering as you’ve ever seen,” then-Progressive Conservative premier Grant Devine said 30 years ago on March 8, 1989 after unveiling in the Speech from the Throne a plan to privatize the then-subsidiary of SaskPower. “This is (the NDP’s) Alamo. This is their Waterloo. This is the end of the line for them. This is it.”

Devine was at least right about what turned out to be the most vehement opposition to a bill in Saskatchewan history.

“April 21, 1989 will be remembered as a day of bitter betrayal,” then-NDP leader Roy Romanow said the day the SaskEnergy privatization bill was introduced. That set off three weeks where the Opposition refused to show up while bells rang continuously to call members to the assembly, preventing new business from taking place and essentially shutting down the government.

“I think the PC government crossed the Rubicon. It has signed its own death warrant … This is going to be a political firestorm the likes of which this province has seldom seen.”

While the rhetoric on both sides was extreme, for only one side was it prophetic.

The next provincial election two-and-a-half years later would see Romanow’s NDP form the largest Saskatchewan majority government ever, decimating Devine’s PCs to 10 seats. In a little more than eight years, the PC party would be put into hiatus — a status from which it would never really emerge.

Devine had made one of the great miscalculations in Saskatchewan political history in thinking that public support for privatization would go beyond the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan to both SaskEnergy and Saskatchewan Government Insurance. “There is an entrepreneurial class in Saskatchewan and there has always been,” Devine said then.