The Saskatchewan Party government's decision to seek out a liberation therapy treatment study for multiple sclerosis (MS) sufferers was based on emotion.

Contrary to some critics of the government's choice, this wasn't an inherently bad thing. Government decisions are often arrived at through emotion and passion.

It is a wrong approach when a government decision comes out of anger, spite or a need to be punitive. But when the politics comes from passion - or, better put, compassion - it can make for brave and innovative policy choices.

It was compassion (or, perhaps in a partisan political sense, the desire to demonstrate your political rival is not compassionate) that drove Premier Brad Wall to declare soon after the 2007 election that his government would pay for the late-stage cancer drug Avastin. The previous NDP government's drug formulary committee had determined it was not cost-effective.

Similarly, it was the Wall government's decision to finance the costs of a young widow named Crystal Bonderud for her expenses incurred at the Mayo Clinic, even though she and her late husband did not secure prior approval for the trip. (Bonderud launched a million-dollar suit against the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency for misdiagnosis of her late husband Doug's cancer. That suit was later settled.)

Some still argue that neither were the right choices, but they were compassionate ones. And you simply can't always remove the emotion from such governance decisions ... nor necessarily should you.

Yes, we need protocols to prevent everyone from going down to the Mayo Clinic for less crucial procedures and sticking the taxpayers with the bill. Yes, taxpayers cannot afford to pay for every new drug that comes on the market and we need formulary committees of experts to help make some tough choices.

But politicians also sometimes need to set aside protocol and allow their decisions to be governed by what their hearts tell them. After all, if dollars and cents were the only consideration, would Tommy Douglas have ever burdened the taxpayers with medicare?

It is for this reason, it's hard to condemn the Sask. Party government's decision two years ago to set aside $2.2 million to send 86 people from Saskatchewan (which has one of the highest MS rates in the world) to the U.S. to participate in a study of liberation therapy.

Nor is there much value in condemning the $150,000 the government now won't recover for six residents who have already participated in this study.

But for the Saskatchewan government to want to continue to prove that liberation therapy is a miracle cure - especially in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary - is not terribly compassionate nor wise.

"Our priority is to try to find a similar type of study, but we're realistic to know that might not be possible," Health Minister Dustin Duncan told reporters Monday.

Let us hope the government is realistic.

The Albany Medical Centre said it had to abandon its test because of a lack of participants willing to undergo the procedure knowing that there was a 50/50 chance they would not get the actual treatment.

But doesn't the very fact that the study couldn't find enough participants in all of the United States and Canada (remember: hundreds in Saskatchewan alone initially applied to be among the 86 participants) tell us something about how few MS sufferers that scientists believe liberation therapy can actually help? And doesn't it say even more about the growing skepticism - even within a divided MS community - that liberation therapy is the miracle cure many thought it would be two years ago?

Stories abound in the past two years of the treatment offering initial relief and then patients reverting back to their old symptoms in the ensuing months. Dr. R.M. Preshaw of the B.C. Medical Association Committee went so far last April as to call the testing a "fiasco".

And even those who still believe in liberation therapy now acknowledge it won't help all MS sufferers. If a government is truly compassionate, should it be trying to help as many MS sufferers as possible? If so, doesn't that mean redirecting that remaining $2-million plus into research on the cause and control of MS, rather than trying to find that miracle cure?

There is nothing wrong with a government being passionate about something it believes can work.

But there would something wrong if the government now decided to ignore all evidence to the contrary.

Mandryk is the political columnist for the Leader-Post