Time to drop the Sally Field act - Guest Post

Roger Currie, local radio personality and also a parishioner, does a regular editorial piece called Currie's Corner. With Roger's permission, I am reprinting the April 27, 2010 edition. You can listen to the piece (at least for a few days) here.

Isn’t it about time the province of Saskatchewan stopped behaving like Sally Field at Oscars in 1985? That was the night she picked up her second gold statue for “Places in the Heart” and proclaimed “You like me. Right now, you really like me”.

This province gets a cover in Saturday’s Report on Business in the Globe and Mail, and some people still feel that a party must be thrown. The article, written by Gordon Pitts, proclaimed Saskatchewan has “arrived”, and the rest of the world now recognizes us for the prosperous place that we are. He rattled off a ton of numbers which basically proclaimed that “we’re number one”.

Pardon me if I offer up a news editor’s reaction .. “nothing new in that piece”. Saskatchewan has been the economic leader among provinces for the past two or three years, depending on which indicator you care to look at.

The only thing that WAS new in Gordon’s story was the fact that a Porsche dealership is about to open in Saskatoon for the first time. I find that a bit of a dubious indicator, not unlike the running gag Winnipeg went through about getting an IKEA store. By the way, it WILL be opening in the Manitoba city later this year.

Who knows .. maybe Regina might finally get an Olive Garden. Seriously, I hope we’ll soon be able to finally cast off the mentality that says “Saskatchewan is next year country” and “it’s not our turn yet”.

Of greater importance to me, instead of measuring our prosperity by the number of high end places there are to spend money, I’d rather see a measurement of how we’re doing at taking care of those at the other end of the scale. What percentage of our people regularly use food banks?

Watching that number go down would give me greater joy that watching sales of fancy cars go up.

For 620 CKRM, I’m Roger Currie.