Progressive Party of Saskatchewan
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Progressive Party of Saskatchewan
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| Former provincial party | |
| Founded | 1920s |
| Dissolved | mid-1930s |
| Ideology | agrarianism, progressivism, social democracy |
| Colours | Green |
The Progressive Party of Saskatchewan was a provincial section of the Progressive Party of Canada and was active from the 1920s to the mid-1930s. The Progressives were an agrarian, social democratic political movement originally dedicated to political and economic reform and challenging economic policies that favoured the financial and industrial interests in Central Canada over agrarian and to some extent labour interests. Like its federal counterpart it favoured free trade over protectionism.
Despite the dominance of agriculture in Saskatchewan, the Progressive Party of Saskatchewan was never able to match the success it and the United Farmers movement had in other provinces such as Alberta where the United Farmers of Alberta took power, Manitoba where the Progressive Party of Manitoba was able to form government or even Ontario where the United Farmers of Ontario took power in 1919.
This was largely because while in other provinces farmers organizations were increasingly alienated from mainline political parties, in Saskatchewan the ruling Saskatchewan Liberal Party had made an extra effort to ally itself with farmers interests and worked closely with the Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association which, in turn, resisted efforts to create a farmers' political party in the province.
The Progressives ran seven candidates and elected six members to the Saskatchewan legislature in the 1921 general election despite the absence of a provincial organization due to the reluctance of the Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association to break with the Saskatchewan Liberal Party.
The Liberals had a tradition of consulting the SGGA about farm policy and of appointing prominent farm activists to cabinet such as Charles Dunning and John Maharg. A political crisis ensued the Liberal government in late 1921 in which Premier William Melville Martin angered the SGGA by campaigning for the federal Liberal Party of Canada against the Progressive Party of Canada in the 1921 federal election. Agriculture Minister Maharg, a former SGGA president, resigned from the Cabinet in protest and crossed the floor to sit as an Independent and become Leader of the Opposition. Martin himself was forced to step down and the federal Progressives won 15 of 16 Saskatchewan seats in the federal election.
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