The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Travelling across the Prairies by train, English author Derek Patmore wrote, "This country could do with a great deal of editing!" His tongue-in-cheek remark illustrates the inability of many Europeans to grasp the concept of distance as it applies to Canada and the Prairies. This year, Saskatchewan celebrates the 100th anniversary of its entry into Confederation. To mark this milestone, Canada Post will issue a commemorative 50-cent stamp on August 2, 2005. The stamp image will compress in time and space three uniquely Saskatchewan vignettes that portray this land of hope and promise under a single great canopy of blue sky. Saskatchewan is the heart of the Canadian prairie. Vast open vistas and sunshine frame bountiful farms and crops that feed the nation and the world. Much of Saskatchewan gently rolls away to the horizon. That roll, while gentle and soothing, is deceiving. The eye can still see clearly features in villages and landmarks, which may be some 20 km away, but appear to be much closer. The Cree speak of a great flood from which Saskatchewan was born, and the rocks say this is so. Once covered by ancient seas and glaciers, today the province benefits from riches deposited deep below ground; gold, copper, zinc, lead, uranium, oil, gas, potash, sodium, sulphate and coal. After the seas receded, incredible reptiles and mammals made their home there before the thunder of stampeding bison shook the plains. And the constant is the land, the pride of Saskatchewan's farmers. Saskatchewan entered Confederation in 1905, but was settled much earlier. Aboriginal people, Mtis, fur traders and the Hudson's Bay Company set up outposts in the wilderness. By 1870, the push was on to entice homesteaders to the Prairie. With the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, settlers moved from the East, or from across the Atlantic from as far away as the Ukraine. By 1905, about 146,000 immigrants a year were pouring into Saskatchewan. This province gave Canada its first woman governor general (Jeanne Sauv) and its first Ukrainian governor general (Ramon Hnatyshyn). Political leaders such as John Diefenbaker and Tommy Douglas, the Father of Medicare, came from here. Hockey stars such as Glenn Hall and Gordie Howe, and curlers Ernie Richardson and the incomparable Sandra Schmirler honed their skills on the Saskatchewan Prairie. Singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie and actor Gordon Tootoosis, writer W.O. Mitchell and physician David Williams, who flew on the Shuttle Columbia, all hail from Saskatchewan. 2/8/05
