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Saskatchewan:
"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.
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