It was 20 years ago when a seminal paper that helped foster a new view of this province was released and one of its tenets was for Saskatchewan to focus on growing the population.
Action Saskatchewan, the vision of Stan Schmidt who had become president of the provincial Chamber in 1999, was a Blueprint for what Saskatchewan might look like as we approached the beginning of our second century as a province.
We are reminded of the need for a bigger population daily in the housing game, in federal elections and in a couple recent developments in the aviation business. One is the lack of an American link for the Regina Airport and the other was WestJet’s decision to suspend non-stop flights to key US destinations for part of the winter. This decision was triggered by the grounding of Max 8 Boeings but we have been unusually central to the two-percent cut in WestJet’s service due the Boeing issue.
No doubt if we had more people, and as a result more air service, we’d see reductions, not the loss of entire routes.
