Blakeney's Long Game

Blakeney transformed Saskatchewan and re-shaped Canada by working across party lines and never losing sight of the big picture.

The big hats on the Canadian political stage occupy much of our history and collective memory. But that history is often the product of many less swaggering leaders. Allan Blakeney is an exemplar of this very Canadian breed.

Like Robert Stanfield, Bill Davis, or Ed Schreyer, Blakeney is of that generation of premiers who played key roles on the national stage while transforming their own provinces. Like Peter Lougheed, Rene Levesque, and Dave Barrett, however, Blakeney was also a premier you did not tangle with lightly when it came to the defense of his people’s interests – whether you were a union president, a prime minister, or a corporate titan.

Allan Blakeney is a product of Atlantic Canadian roots and Prairie experience. He is one of the few living veterans of the birth of Canadian social democracy in government – the election of Tommy Douglas in 1944. As a young bureaucrat, then politician, then leader and premier he had a place at the centre of some of the most fascinating political battles in post-war Canada – and as a tough, fearless strategist he fought those battles with a quiet, but relentless determination. AEB, as he was called by colleagues and friends, had high expectations. Those who suffered the sting of his anger at failure had another nickname for him, “the Black Widow.” He rarely bragged publicly about his victories – though he relished his triumphs with a high cackling laugh in private.

As a young civil servant, Blakeney saw the battle to force doctors to accept publicly funded medicare, and to accept the attendant loss of political leverage. He built medicare in Saskatchewan. As premier, he nationalized the potash industry, when its American owners refused to pay their royalties, over the loud objections of Henry Kissinger and Ottawa. As party leader he stared down his own activists’ resistance to mining uranium. He thumped public sector unions that threatened essential services, most famously during a threatened shutdown of the province’s power system mid-winter.

He led a coolly competent and disciplined government, one that churned out a generation of exceptional public servants who migrated to leadership positions across Canada, one that delivered an array of innovative services at a high level of quality in a jurisdiction with fewer voters than the city of Toronto.

But it was his fight first for a province’s constitutional right to tax its own resources, and then his showdown with Pierre Trudeau over patriation that puts him among the new Fathers of Confederation. Peter Lougheed gets a lot of the public credit for the battle over oil and gas taxation, but it was Allan Blakeney, the superb legal strategist who devised and then led the successful Supreme Court challenge to secure a province’s first call on its own resources.

Roy Romanow and Roy McMurtry get well deserved credit for piecing together the famous “kitchen deal” that ended the 1980 constitutional war. But the game plan, the redlines, and the possible alliances were laid out quietly months before, by Saskatchewan’s savvy statesman. He was, and remains, deeply skeptical about the shift in balance between law and politics that the Charter represents. Nonetheless, he threw his team into negotiating hard on every clause, helping to deliver one of the finest documents of its kind in modern history.

So if you’re a fan of medicare, or of your province’s ability to use your resources to deliver quality public services, or simply nostalgic for the days of quietly competent government, read the story of Allan Blakeney, an icon for many of the qualities that make one proud to be a Canadian.

Among the many lessons Blakeney’s career holds for today’s leader, here are three:

1. Always think strategically. Plan wisely, execute with discipline, and never get moved off your “long game” and you will eventually prevail.

2. Recognize your political allies are not the same as your party base. Peter Lougheed was an important private ally of Blakeney, as was Jean Chretien.

3. Let the power of your ideas and achievements shout for you. Bellowing rhetoric will never have the same impact.