Chapter 3: First Half of 1991
It was the calm before the storm.
The following is a free preview of Chapter 3 of Saskatchewan In the Nineties, a book I’ve written (a couple times at this point) and opted to release, one chapter at a time, on Substack.
For the next few weeks I’m opening up all the chapters I’ve published if you’d like to catch up. I hope you enjoy it and that you come back and join us again - T.
Small town best friends on a road trip: director Ridley Scott turned the genre into a work of poetic justice in Thelma and Louise, which was regalling Saskatchewan residents in theatres in early 1991 alongside a long list of other soon-to-be classics including Billy Crystal’s City Slickers. Alan Rickman, fresh off his acting debut three years prior in Die Hard, delighted in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves alongside Kevin Costner.
ABC, CBS and NBC warred for top billing in home entertainment with their offerings of Roseanne, Murphy Brown and Cheers respectively. Kate Moss was about to breakout in fashion circles and eating disorder clinics with her waiflike look, dubbed “heroin chic”. Vuarnet t-shirts were a status symbol in Saskatchewan high schools and elementary schools alike.
On the radio R.E.M. was losing its religion and Michael Bolton insisted Love Is A Wonderful Thing. Extreme’s iconic entry into Nineties music with More Than Words was finally descending the Billboard charts as EMF’s Unbelievable flew past on its way up.
As he listened to those new tunes on one of Regina’s FM radio station’s noon hour countdown shows, John Scraba ran an errand he had dozens of times already over the past year or more.
Parking his Legislature-provided Pontiac Tempest in the usual spot in the lot of Regina’s Golden Mile Shopping Centre, he hurried through the double doors next to Woodwards.
Or Woolco.
Woolworth’s. That was it.
A warm waft of cheese and garlic from Regina’s legendary Trifon’s Pizza made his stomach growl. Maybe he’d grab a slice on the way out; eat in the car.
Between his messy divorce and running communications and a fraud ring for the PC Party government, most of John Scraba’s meals in those days were consumed on the run. Grant Devine and his caucus were dead politicians walking, with only a few months left before they’d be forced to call an election.
On that last day of January, 1991, Scraba withdrew 101 one-thousand dollar bills from the PC Party caucuses RBC account at Golden Mile. After tucking the two-and-a-half inch thick stack of bills into an envelope and shoving it into his briefcase, he drove back down Albert Street towards the Legislature, munching on a slice of Sicilian.
Normally the return trip was a quick one. Scraba would make a right-hand turn at Legislative Drive, where he would stash the $1000 bills in his office.
That day he continued past his workplace, eventually easing the Tempest into the parkade of Regina’s iconic Cornwall Centre, where he strolled into the mall’s CIBC location.
Once alone in the vault, Scraba removed the fat envelope from his briefcase and added it to what was already in the safety deposit box, which he’d leased one year earlier under the name Fred Peters. With the new bills tucked away inside, the box contained a total of exactly $150,000.
Scraba struggled to stretch the elastic band a second time around the now three-inch stack of $1000 notes resting in his palm, each one secretly and willfully extracted fraudulently from the Government of Saskatchewan’s public bank account.
That day was the last time Scraba would ever touch $150,000, or anything close to it.
Unburdened, Scraba stopped at the teller to return the deposit box key, but had other business to attend to as well. It was a new year and he needed to pay the box’s annual fee.
He had a request.
“Can I pay for two years today?” he asked.
“I’m leaving the country.”
Elwin Hermanson was pumped.
In just one year, Hermanson had increased the Saskatchewan membership of Preston Manning’s federal Reform Party from 600 to 4000, as he told anyone who would listen.
The conservative Reform Party was still largely viewed as a fringe party in Canada, but Saskatchewan was finally starting to thaw to the idea.
“Saskatchewan is not the type of province to jump on the bandwagon like Alberta will or even BC,” said Hermanson in a February edition of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix. “They’ll look something over more and once they have determined that is the route to take, they’ll stand with you longer than people will in Alberta.”
In the same story Hermanson was adamant that there was no future plans for the Reform Party to fracture itself into provincial politics, but that hadn’t stopped more respondents to a poll ran by the Regina Leader Post a year prior from claiming they’d vote for the Reform Party over Grant Devine and his party.
As spring 1991 approached, farmers once again prepared for heartache and loss. Both the federal and provincial budgets proved the rumors were true - stabilization payments from Ottawa, once the cornerstone of Devine’s power over rural Saskatchewan, had dried up.
Devine needed a plan. Fast.
He had one. ‘in early March 1991 Grant Devine and the PC Party announced the Government of Saskatchewan planned to decentralize public services into rural communities, away from Saskatoon and Regina.
This was the lofty plan dubbed “Fair Share Saskatchewan”.
Devine insisted Fair Share would build on and compliment the moves he’s already made, such as situating the Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation’s offices in Melville. He also pointed to precedent set by Citibank, which had moved a chunk of its people and operations out of New York City into South Dakota, claiming it had been a huge win in its organization.
Not mentioned as much was a similar plan announced by the Province of Manitoba, which had been universally panned by its residents.
In an exchange in the Saskatchewan Legislature between Opposition Leader Roy Romanow and Grant Devine, Romanow asked Devine to justify the massive potential price tag for Fair Share Saskatchewan, when StatsCan had just reported that the highest provincial proportion of children living in poverty in Canada was in Saskatchewan.
“Mr. Speaker, the real poverty in Saskatchewan is in rural Saskatchewan because they've suffered the collapse of farm income. We've seen towns and villages all over this province lose population, Mr. Speaker…
People all over Saskatchewan have suffered because of $2 wheat, 21 per cent interest rates. They've suffered, Mr. Speaker, because of commodity wars, and no other jurisdiction in Canada has suffered… if there's poverty in this province, this government knows that it's in rural Saskatchewan.
Those people have lost their farms, lost their incomes. They've had to move, Mr. Speaker.
They've been in real, real difficulty and that member, Mr. Speaker, as in 1982, wouldn't lift a finger. And today he abandons them again, Mr. Speaker. He abandons them. Well I haven't, Mr. Speaker, and we'll stick up for them. You can count on that.”- Premier Grant Devine, Saskatchewan Legislature, June 18, 1991
Refusing to acknowledge the StatsCan numbers, instead Devine insisted that if there was poverty in the province at all, it only existed in rural communities.
He was playing into a period of uncertainty that had gripped North America, in the grip of its first international crisis since the Cold War. In August of 1990 Saddam Hussein had invaded the oil-rich Arab state of Kuwait, prompting the US and 43 allied countries to launch a counterattack.
Operation Desert Storm had kicked off in January 1991, relentlessly carpet-bombing Iraq from the air. A ceasefire had been declared at the end of February but the details were still being worked out. Brian Mulroney had just received the green light from Iraq’s top two adversaries, Turkey and Iran, to contribute to the humanitarian efforts for Iraqi refugees who fled American bombs.
As winter thawed and snow melt ran down the city’s hills, residents of the city of Prince Albert, Indigenous peoples and the country as a whole were reeling. It had been four months since Leo Lachance, 48, was found dying on on a downtown P.A. sidewalk from a gunshot wound to the back.
In April of 1991 loud, proud white supremacist Carney Nerland, 25, would plea to a manslaughter charge and only receive four years in jail for shooting and killing LaChance, from Whitefish First Nation.
LaChance had made the fatal mistake of simply walking into Nerland’s pawn shop.
Saskatchewan judge William Gerein said in his own stunningly racist ruling that he found “nothing in the circumstances themselves… that (Nerlen’s) act was politically motivated in any way by (his) political beliefs”.
The judge couldn’t find evidence of racism in Nerland’s shooting of an Indigenous person, despite the fact that just eighteen months prior to murdering LaChance, Nerland had been appointed the leader of the Saskatchewan branch of the Church of Jesus Christ Aryan Nations.
Despite the fact that six months before shooting LaChance, Nerland had attended a KKK rally in Provost, Alberta.
Even after a Prince Albert resident found LaChance dying on the sidewalk that frozen January night and ran into Nerland’s shop shouting for someone to call police, at which Nerland lied and said he didn’t have a phone.
No, Justice Gerein couldn’t find racism in Nerland’s actions, even though a 16-year veteran of the Prince Albert police force, Cst Howard Darbyshire, submitted an affidavit that when driving Nerland back to the Prince Albert Provincial Correctional Centre (PAPCC) after a bail hearing, Nerland said out loud and unprompted,
“You know, when I am convicted - if I am convicted - for shooting that Indian, you’ll have to pin a medal on me. I did you all a favor.”
When Darbyshire asked him what he meant, Nerland snarked back “You know what I mean.”
Darbyshire’s affidavit also swore that when he got Nerland back to the PAPCC that day, Nerland noticed the prison cook was Asian and announced, “I won’t eat that Chink food, I’ll starve first, I won’t eat anything unless it’s prepared by a white man.”
Regarding Darbyshire’s sworn affidavit, Gerein claimed even if that’s what Nerland had said, he just couldn’t be certain that’s how Nerland really felt. Further, said Gerein, even if Nerland felt that way in that moment, the judge couldn’t be sure if the comments were related to how Nerland felt at the time of the shooting.
Gerein ordered Nerland serve his time, which at four years should have been in a federal institution, in a much cosier provincial facility, citing Nerland’s lack of criminal history and need to be near his wife and three-year old child. Not mentioned was the fact that Nerland’s friend and one of the men in store with him the day LaChance was murdered, was also guard at that particular jail.
98 percent of Prince Albert residents who responded to a poll conducted by the Prince Albert Herald said the sentence was too lenient. The Prince Albert Tribal Council (now Grand Council) and the FSIN, headed by then-chief Roland Crowe, demanded an inquiry, to which the RCMP was vigorously opposed.
Saskatchewan’s Minister of Justice, Gary Lane, agreed with the RCMP and at that point the Nerland crisis was considered closed.
Curious residents lined up at demo booths in Saskatoon and Regina malls, looking for their chance to learn what the Maestro talk was all about.
The new phone had just been launched by SaskTel (in Regina and Saskatoon only) with huge fanfare. Call-waiting, call return, call trace - it had it all.
It was also the first day of the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN) strike.
The day before, Friday May 10, 1991, over 5500 nurses walked off the job at 7AM, with picket lines going up at nearly one hundred Saskatchewan hospitals. By Friday night both sides had agreed to outside mediation, which still left health care administrators attempting to fill nursing roles.
Thousands of patients were discharged from provincial hospitals, with thousands more having appointments and surgeries cancelled. The Manitoba Union of Nurses’ leader was forced to walk back her public demand that Manitoba nurses refuse to work on Saskatchewan patients, as transfers for more serious cases were under consideration.
The strike announcement arrived just a few weeks after the Devine government’s 1991 budget, which brought with it major cuts to Saskatoon and Regina hospitals operating budgets - cuts that were blamed on the incoming wage increase for nurses, whatever that would be.
The Saskatchewan public had been primed to believe nurses were greedy.
Enter star labour mediator Vince Ready. After eleven hard days of negotiating, a resolution to the impasse meant nurses were able to head back to the workplace. They’d reluctantly agreed to a modest wage increase (increasing their annual full time salary to between $29K and $38K) and upgraded job security.
Meanwhile, Anne Murray’s lawyer was forced into Saskatchewan courts, again, this time to file for an appeal after a Saskatchewan judge deemed a man unfit for trial after his latest round of stalking and harassing Canada’s Songbird.
“We always tried to get him the help he needed. I guess he had an obsession and became blinded by it. There were times when I’d be singing and he’d come and he’d come and grab me from the audience.” - Anne Murray on Robert Kieling, her stalker from Saskatchewan. Saskatoon Star Phoenix, May 22, 1991
And as sunlight once again waned into the evening, a group of Saskatchewan Legislature employees sat down for drinks one spring Friday after work at the upscale Memories bar in a hotel in downtown Regina, as was tradition.
“Terry”, an unnamed Crown corporation employee, met up with his wife and her colleague Marilyn Barowski, who worked in the Legislature’s finance department processing MLA expense forms. As the night wore on and Marilyn’s libations kicked in, Terry listened to Marilyn share her concerns regarding Devine’s caucus and its claims from companies she didn’t think existed.
Marilyn indicated that her colleague, Gwenn Ronyk, had felt the same way and had taken her concerns to Speaker Arnold Tulsa two years prior but had been dismissed. She also lamented the fact she was sworn to secrecy and couldn’t do anything about her suspicions.
A few years later Terry told the Regina Leader Post about what he heard that night,
“I had no idea how big this was or what it was. All I knew is there was definitely evidence of wrongdoing and that the way things were, it was set up for this never coming out.” - Anonymous Devine scandal whistleblower, February 3, 1997 Regina Leader Post
Terry also told the Leader Post that it was with much reluctance that he even reported the crimes at all.
“The big question is if you had to do it all over again, would you? And I’m not so sure I would. On that day, I did what I had to do and realized when I did it that I could ultimately suffer worse than any of the people who had actually done wrong. If my wife and I had both lost our jobs, it would not have been a pretty picture.”
Terry would wait, ponder and fret about it for another three months before taking the information to the RCMP’s commercial crime division in July 1991.
No matter how hard everyone pushed back, winds of change were blowing across the world, even all the way into Saskatchewan.
In June of 1991 Grant Devine’s Minister of Health, George McLeod, smugly vetoed a request from the Saskatchewan College of Physicians and Surgeons that would have allowed provincial doctors to conduct abortion procedures in dedicated clinics.
The provincial NDP was fine with it. Health critic and Saskatchewan NDP MLA Louise Simard told reporters that the NDP position was “to provide access to abortions in hospital and not have free-standing abortion clinics”.
Dr Henry Morgentaler, an abortion advocate, was not nearly as relaxed.
“I will establish a clinic in defiance of this law…(McLeod showed) a callous disregard for the health of women.” - Dr Henry Morgentaler, 1991, on Grant Devine government’s decision to veto abortion clinics in Saskatchewan.
A June 1991 survey conducted by Angus Reid commissioned by local newspapers and television newsrooms revealed that more than half of Saskatchewan residents were in favour of opening Sunday shopping, especially at grocery stores.
Former STC executives Darrell Lowry and Don Castle each faced multiple charges related to criminal conspiracy and fraud, but their trial was once again delayed, this time til September of that year, after Lowry’s lawyers quit due to non-payment.
Provincial reporters had just learned that the headquarters of that decentralization plan of Devine’s, which were supposed to be in Watrous, had actually been set up in Saskatoon’s flashy new downtown Ramada hotel. Security at the hotel was tight, with the entire 11th floor locked and cordoned off at both the stairwell and the elevator.
Reporters asked Devine’s government why an office dedicated to decentralizing public services to rural Saskatchewan had been secretly moved back to one of the urban centres the government was supposed to be vacating.
There was no good answer.
Fed up, the Saskatchewan Government Employees’ Union (SGEU) recognized it was time for drastic action and at the end of June 1991, filed a lawsuit against Devine’s government, alleging it was violating government employees Canadian Charter rights by limiting their freedom of movement in order to politicize their jobs. SGEU also contended that the move was a violation of Saskatchewan’s Public Service Act. Rumors also swirled over the possibility of an illegal government employee walkout, or wildcat strike.
An internal government report leaked to the Saskatoon Star Phoenix clearly showed the Devine government had lied about the cost of relocating just one Ministry (Agriculture), which would cost three to four times more to move per employee than claimed.
By this point the backlash against Fair Share was so extensive that Devine had already begun to walk it back, claiming only approximately 125 employees, or less than 10% of the public service, would be moved that year.
At best, SGEU hoped a judge would shut down the program, but even a moratorium for consultation would be welcome. The provincial election, by law, had to be called within the next three months. With Devine’s imminent demise looking more and more certain, any delay to Fair Share would likely be enough to halt it altogether.
This has been a free preview of Saskatchewan In the Nineties, a book I’ve written (a couple times at this point) and opted to release, one chapter at a time, on Substack.
I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you come back and join us again - T.