"You'd marry anyone to get out of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan",
Susan Sarandon tells Burt Lancaster in Louis Malle's film
Atlantic City , and the whole province is regarded with
similar disdain by many Canadians. It's certainly not one of the
country's glamour regions, remaining as dependent on agriculture as
it was when the province was established in 1905, and today
producing 42 percent of Canada's wheat, 39 percent of its canola,
35 percent of its rye and 20 percent of its barley. Saskatchewan's
farmers often struggle to make ends meet when international prices
fall, and consequently they have formed various Wheat Pools
, which attempt to control freight charges and sell the grain at
the best possible time. The political spin-off has been the
evolution of a strong socialist tradition, built on the farmers'
mistrust of the market. For many years Saskatchewan was a
stronghold of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF)
, the forerunner of the New Democratic Party (NDP), and in 1944 the
CCF formed the country's first leftist provincial government,
pushing through bills to set up state-run medical and social
security schemes.
However underprivileged Saskatchewan might have been in the
past, its image as a featureless zone is grossly unfair. Even the
dreariest part of the province, to the south of the Yellowhead
Highway, has some splendid diversions, notably Regina 's
intriguing Royal Canadian Mounted Police Museum, and the coulees
and buttes of the Grasslands National Park . On the
Yellowhead itself, Saskatoon , Saskatchewan's largest city,
has an attractive riverside setting and boasts good restaurants,
plus a complex devoted to the culture of the Northern Plains
Indians. Further west, Battleford has a splendidly restored
Mountie stockade, while to the north Batoche National Historic
Park , occupying a fine location beside the South Saskatchewan
River, commemorates the Métis rebellion of 1885. Not far away from
Batoche, Prince Albert National Park marks the geographical
centre of the province, where the aspen parkland of the south meets
the boreal forests and lakes of the north. There are some wonderful
walks and canoe routes here, even though the park's tourist
village, Waskesiu Lake , is rather commercialized.
North of Prince Albert Park, the desolate wilderness of the
Canadian Shield is mostly inaccessible except by float plane; the
main exception is the town of La Ronge , which is on the
edge of the canoe routes and good fishing waters of Lac La Ronge
Provincial Park and the Churchill River . By comparison,
the area bordering eastern Alberta has less to offer, though the
desultory prairie landscape that makes up its south and centre does
incorporate some of the hills, forests and ravines of the
Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park .
The region's public transport system is limited, but
there are regular scheduled bus services between most of the
major towns, and a useful, once-daily summertime bus from the town
of Prince Albert to Waskesiu Lake, in Prince Albert Park, and La
Ronge.