Wall and his Saskatchewan Party took office at a time when global commodity prices began to soar, particularly for oil, potash, and uranium, but also for coal and agricultural products, and the economy started to boom accordingly. With resource revenues high, Wall focused on overseeing a period of growth and the province saw numbers of jobs increase by an average of 6,500 per year, while the province's population grew every year under Wall's premiership and by over 150,000 people overall. Wall instituted widespread tax cuts and guided investments in health care, education, and infrastructure. In 2010 he signed Saskatchewan onto the New West Trade Partnership Agreement with Alberta and British Columbia, a free-trade pact that expanded to include Manitoba in 2017. In 2014 the province was awarded a AAA credit rating. However, after commodity prices crashed beginning in 2014 the province ran into significant economic turmoil. While Wall had been successful early on in paying down Saskatchewan's debt, which had nearly bankrupted the province in 1992 and reached a low of $7.9 billion in 2009, the debt rose rapidly after 2014 and would balloon to $14.8 billion in 2017. That year the province's credit rating was downgraded to AA. Wall's 2017 budget, the sixth deficit out of ten budgets under Wall, was deeply unpopular and criticized by many for its austerity and for disproportionately burdening poor and marginalized citizens in its efforts to address fiscal mismanagement. While the budget maintained a commitment to lowering corporate tax rates, the provincial sales tax was increased and deep cuts were made to social services and education. The budget also included cuts to grants to municipalities, which created budget crises for a number of municipalities. While the Saskatchewan Party was criticized for its costly investment in applying the Lean program to its health care system, Wall has been credited with reducing Saskatchewan's surgical wait times from among the longest in Canada to among the shortest through the use of private surgical clinics within the public system. The policy was initially controversial but soon became popular due to the favorable results.