But this work takes time combing reports, documents, digging, and a stubborn willingness to read past the spin and find the part the Sask Party government hopes you’ll miss.

Because nowadays, there’s always something they don’t want you to know.

If you value that — if you want independent reporting that is not softened, manipulated or omitted for advertisers, political parties, or corporate access — please consider taking out a paid subscription or making a donation.

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That support is what keeps this work alive.

It pays for the hours, the research, the records, and the ability to keep publishing hard Saskatchewan truths in public.

If you want more of this kind of reporting, the best way to make sure it continues is to back it now.

Plus, I have a good one coming out on the PC Party of Saskatchewan. Nothing earth-shattering, but it is sooooooo absolutely, incompetently Saskatchewan that it’s almost funny. What’s not funny is the unserious, naked opportunism of a few, while real opportunities to provide a political home for Saskatchewan residents who don’t feel represented by the Sask Party anymore, and will never feel represented by the Saskatchewan NDP, are missed, over and over again.

It’ll be paywalled. You won’t want to miss it.

There is a certain kind of Saskatchewan political performance that depends on saying two contradictory things with a straight face and hoping nobody lays the statements side by side.

That is where Saskatchewan now finds itself on the Bell AI Fabric data-centre project near Regina. The public pitch is clean and comforting: jobs, sovereignty, innovation, no strain on the system, no water problem, no rate problem, no real downside if we all just clap for the future loudly enough.

Except the paper trail says something so very different.

Start with the most obvious discrepancy: power.

In its 2025-26 annual report, SaskPower openly boasted that its ability to provide 300 MW of reliable and affordable power was a key reason Bell chose Saskatchewan for a major AI data centre near Regina.

The province’s March 2026 announcement said the Crown corporations would help make it happen: SaskPower on transmission and electricity, SaskTel on fibre, SaskEnergy on gas infrastructure.

This was not some free-floating private project descending from the heavens. It was a Sask Party-government-enabled, public infrastructure-backed industrial deal.

Last month Scott Moe and little Jeremy Harrison trotted out with their new Data Centre Framework, insisting future projects should generally bring their own power so they do not burden the provincial grid.

Fascinating.

Because Bell did not “bring its own power” in the ordinary sense the government is now preaching to everyone else. Bell was sold on Saskatchewan precisely because SaskPower could serve the load. The province is trying to write a tough new rule after already helping its chosen flagship through the gate.

That alone should make people suspicious.

What makes the Saskatchewan Data Centre Framework announcement even more cynical is that the government quietly tucked in the fact that “more than 30 applications” for data-centre developments are already in the queue.

That is not a stray administrative detail — that is the whole damn story.

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If this iteration of our corrupt, incompetent government under the likes of Moe and Jeremy Harrison is reviewing 30-plus more AI or data-centre proposals, then this is not about one Bell project anymore; it is about opening the door to a whole class of massive power-hungry developments while pretending the public is just being handed a tidy little “framework.”

The Sask Party initially buried the number because it blows up the sales pitch.

It tells the public this is not a cautious, one-off experiment but the early stages of a much bigger buildout, with much bigger consequences for rates, grid capacity, land use, water infrastructure, and political accountability.

But the rate story is where this thing really starts to stink.

On Bell’s own FAQ page, the company reassures the public that “rates are not going up as a result of the data centre being added to the grid”.

Great line.

Clean. Reassuring.

The problem is that the most recent Saskatchewan Rate Review Panel - the folks deciding how much we’re getting screwed paying for Crown utilities - report points in a much less soothing direction.

The panel warned that SaskPower’s improved 2026-27 forecast was primarily driven by forecast sales from the data-centre project, and that if the timing or revenue from that project slips, the final 2027 increase to our rates could end up 1.5 to 2.5 percentage points higher than the proposed 3.9 per cent.

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What the rate panel is saying, in plain English, is that SaskPower is now counting on Bell becoming a huge new customer and buying a lot of power, with that new revenue helping cover costs.

If Bell’s AI project starts later than expected, ramps up more slowly, or uses less electricity than SaskPower forecast, SaskPower’s costs do not disappear; the debt, infrastructure spending, maintenance and operating costs to service it will still be there. So if the Bell money does not arrive on time, SaskPower has to make up the gap somewhere, and that usually means pushing more of the cost onto everyone else through higher rates.

In other words, the risk is not that Bell somehow makes rates go up by not using electricity; it is that SaskPower may already be using Bell’s promised future payments to justify lower rate increases now.

The panel also said SaskPower’s use of its existing rate structure for very large data-centre loads is only a temporary approach, and recommended that AI data centre customers bear the full costs and risks of service.

Bell says don’t worry, the project is not raising rates.

The rate panel says SaskPower’s near-term financial story already depends on revenue from the project, and if that revenue disappoints, the burden on ratepayers could increase.

Which is it? It can’t be both.

Then there is the water question.

Bell’s FAQ also says the project will not use “any municipal water or groundwater”.

Technically, when a multi-billion dollar corporation has to use the word “Technically,” it’s a red flag.

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Either way, when you put that blurb beside the highlighted passage from the RM of Sherwood’s Data Centre Executive Summary, which says the proposed water distribution network would connect to the City of Regina municipal grid - someone’s not telling the whole truth.

That does not necessarily mean Bell lied about water; the company appears to be talking narrowly about the closed-loop cooling system. But it absolutely means the public-facing line is selective to the point of misdirection.

A normal person reading “this will not use any municipal water” would not assume “except for a new connection to the city’s municipal grid for essential site services.”

Yet that seems to be the fine print.

And then there is the biggest discrepancy of all: the load itself.

Over the past two years, SaskPower’s quarterly in-province electricity sales do not show some dramatic AI-driven breakout.

Quarterly reports reflect a soft 2024-25, then a modest rebound in 2025-26, and a stronger but still incremental Q1 in 2026-27.

Full-year Saskatchewan electricity sales were 23,984 GWh in 2024-25 and 24,319 GWh in 2025-26: growth, yes, but not a surge. In Q1 2026-27, sales rose 176 GWh year-over-year, and SaskPower attributed that mainly to pipeline, potash, pulp and paper activity, not to some already-visible AI stampede.

That matters because a 300 MW data centre running steadily implies something like 2,600+ GWh a year of power demand. That is not a rounding error. That is system-shaping load. If Bell were already ramped anywhere near full tilt, it should be much more obvious in SaskPower’s sales history. So far, it isn’t.

And SaskPower is not making this bet from a position of financial strength. The utility reported a $114 million net loss in 2025-26, then another $125 million net loss in Q1 2026-27. Its debt ratio hit 78.9 per cent, then 80.2 per cent. It has leaned on provincial grants to prop up the Sask Party’s “affordability” bullshit while still pushing rate increases.

At the same time, SaskPower is advancing a $2.6 billion coal life-extension program as a bridge to future nuclear development. So the glossy AI narrative is sitting on top of a utility that is already strained, already borrowing, already hiking rates, and already trying to stretch old fossil assets further into the future.

This is where the provincial comparison becomes embarrassing.

Hydro-Québec is openly proposing a special tariff for large data centres so other customers do not get stuck subsidizing them. Ontario is moving toward a separate rate class and a full-cost framework for new data centres above 1 MW. British Columbia is rationing access through a capped competitive process so utility-backed service does not become an open bar. Alberta is loudly preaching cost-causation and bring-your-own-generation rules. Manitoba has gone further, creating separate customer classes and levies while its premier has openly rejected a hyperscale AI proposal.

Across the country, governments are converging on one basic truth: hyperscale AI loads are not normal industrial customers. They are too large, too risky, too politically explosive, and too capable of shifting costs onto everyone else.

Saskatchewan knows this too. That is why the rate panel is warning about cost exposure. That is why the Sask Party later announced a framework. That is why the language suddenly got tougher.

But as usual, Saskatchewan did things in the dumbest possible order.

It celebrated a winning trophy first, and wrote the game’s rules later.

It’s so lame. Such smoke and mirrors. They truly must think we’re utterly stupid.

That is the real story here.

Not that Bell is investing.

Not that AI infrastructure is inherently bad.

Not even that Saskatchewan should never have pursued the project.

It is that the province spent months selling this as a clean win while the underlying documents show a much darker reality: public grid dependence sacrificed for a private initiative, rate risk softened with coded language, water claims narrowed to the point of being misleading, and a supposedly future-facing growth strategy resting on coal extensions and a wildly financially stressed Crown utility.

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The discrepancy between what they’re feeding us and reality is the point.

The discrepancy is the entire story.

And the more that comes out, the less this looks like sober industrial strategy addressing Saskatchewan’s electric future and the more it looks like Scott Moe and Jeremy Harrison fell in love with yet another way to make themselves feel like Big Bois, before even considering the cost for the rest of us.

I’m calling it right now, and I’m usually not wrong: this Bell AI data centre situation is going to end badly for everybody. Maybe not today, maybe not next month, but it will implode, likely on the power generation side.

I live in a place that relies solely on another country for electricity. Sometimes that country just shuts us off… because it can. We routinely face blackouts, both scheduled and otherwise. The last one was Sunday, scheduled days in advance so we could “prepare” for unrelenting heat, without even a fan. With no power from 7AM til 4PM, businesses stayed closed. I can’t imagine what that one day must have cost the economy in my village.

And these clowns are babbling about “data” sovereignty?

How about protecting Saskatchewan’s power supply first?

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The shopping list is sniper rifles.

Remotely operable hydraulic breaching tools (ie. robotic battering rams, and other items designed to invade and overtake your home).

Thermal cameras.

Night vision goggles.

Ballistic helmets and shields.

And a long-range acoustic device (LRAD) — a literal sound cannon, designed predominantly for riot control, but also tapped into by terrorists for the amount of destruction it can cause. They do not just make a loud noise.

When dialed up, their noise causes severe discomfort, disorientation, headaches, and nausea. At close range they cause permanent hearing damage, tinnitus, and ruptured eardrums.

So all these big boi toys are to use on whom, may I ask?

The Saskatchewan Marshals Service is fifteen months old, has maybe 28 officers on duty (fewer than half of its promised complement of 70). It’s most documented headline achievements are a $587 hat and a misconduct investigation into an officer who quit before the force even launched.

And when the tender hit the news, every single adult supposedly in charge of this Marshal Service claimed the same thing:

Premier Scott Moe: “I wasn’t aware of that.”

Community Safety Minister Michael Weger and “Chief Marshal” (that title alone is embarrassing) Robert Cameron were also reportedly in the dark until the bid was already public.

The denials and inadequate explanation were served up with a straight face at a Friday news conference. An unnamed, “overly ambitious” marshals employee just went ahead and did it, on their own initiative, because he or she was such an eager beaver.

“I'll take overly ambitious over lazy any day of the week, but overly ambitious on starting the process of a Specialized Response Unit when we're not ready for that yet. We're not at that point yet as a Marshals Service." - August 21, 2026, Community Safety Minister Michael Weger, who inexplicably still has a job

Um.

What?

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Let’s set aside the fact Weger’s word salad is the single most insulting thing a public safety minister has ever said to the people paying for his force (that’d be us). Let’s overlook the fact that any trigger-happy-Chad from Scooter’s Moe’s new cop shop can apparently spend our money on millions of dollars in tactical weaponry after clearing it through precisely nobody.

Let’s instead ask the question no one in the Saskatchewan Party can answer, and it’s the only one that matters:

WHO exactly is the enemy here?

Because that’s what an armed force is supposed to be able to tell you.

The marshals were sold to us in December 2024, in Scott Moe’s own voice in the legislature, as a support service — a force that would show up at a significant incident “20 or 30 members deep” to provide, in his words, “the calming effect and the safety that that provides to a community”.

Calming effect.

Safety.

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Reinforcements for rural detachments.

A force that exists to calm a community doesn’t need a breaching kit. A force that exists to back up the RCMP doesn’t need a sound cannon. That gear, “first through the door” equipment, as NDP critic and former RCMP officer Hugh Gordon called it, is for a force that wants to go through doors, and then through people.

The specialized response unit “has always been part of the plan,” as the marshals’ own chief told CBC, and the service itself told The Canadian Press the unit “was identified as a foundational component of the (Saskatchewan Marshal service) since its inception and has been incorporated into the existing budget.”

Read those two sentences again. There is no version of this where someone isn’t either incompetent or a liar.

Either the Chief Marshal has been building a secret SWAT team using public money behind his Minister’s back, or the Minister is lying about not knowing.

And the Premier, of all people, doesn’t get to play the bystander: his government created this agency, wrote it a blank $20-million-a-year cheque, and he has cycled four different ministers through this file since 2022 — Christine Tell, Paul Merriman, Tim McLeod, and now Michael Weger.

When the marshals service was announced in November 2022, the RCMP’s own commander, Rhonda Blackmore, asked the obvious question: “Why is money being put into creating a new infrastructure with a new police service when we have the infrastructure available?”

The RCMP’s union called the whole thing “completely unnecessary” — “a duplicate segmented service,” with different training, different radios, different lines of communication, which union reps warned “may lead to an increase in risk to police and public safety.”

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First Nations chiefs said the same, but blunter: nobody consulted us.

In August 2024, the RCMP union and nearly 90 municipal governments in Saskatchewan formally begged the province to pause the Marshals’ project, citing “serious doubts about the effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability” — after $14 million had already gone up in smoke.

Then came the hats. Fewer than 100 hats for a force that didn’t have a single sworn officer yet, at a cost of $41,151.15 — roughly $587 each.

Then the misconduct case: a marshal placed on paid leave for an allegation of misconduct before the service even launched — while the government was telling us about “the calming effect.”

The officer resigned when the Public Complaints Commission finished its work, and the findings were sealed. As always, the Sask Party told the ombudsman to take a hike, calling the Opposition’s calls for independent scrutiny “politicization”.

By April 2026 the province’s own Information and Privacy Commissioner had ruled that the public has “a right to know and debate the outcome of allegations involving a marshal who is appointed to act in the public trust” and ordered the file released.

Of the 290 pages in that file, 93 were withheld entirely.

What the marshals finally released? Twenty-eight pages.

“Scraps covered in black ink,” in Hugh Gordon’s words. “What on earth did that marshal do?” he asked Minister Weger, live in the legislature.

The answer, then as now: you’re not allowed to know. And Weger’s political response was to accuse the Opposition of disrespecting hard-working public servants.

Then came the poaching.

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The whole sales pitch of the marshals was “more boots on the ground.” But when the NDP did the math this spring, of the 27 marshals hired in this intake, only two were new officers. Twenty-five were lateral transfers from the RCMP and municipal forces — experienced cops stolen from already-starved detachments, given expensive new hats, and then counted, with a straight face, as an expansion of policing.

Because the province pays 100 percent of a marshal’s cost but only 70 percent of an RCMP officer’s, every officer poached costs taxpayers a 30 percent premium.

“Moving an officer down the highway and giving them a new hat is simply a cover-up,” NDP house leader Nicole Sarauer said. She’s right. Tim McLeod stood in the legislature in April 2025 and promised “70 new officers through the Saskatchewan marshals service.” New. That word was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

And ask what any of it has cost and you get the real scandal: nobody knows.

In April 2025 the Standing Committee on Crown and Central Agencies asked the Public Service Commission what it had cost to stand this force up.

The answer, from the PSC's Greg Tuer: "We do not track it on that sort of a project basis."

No project ledger.

No provincial auditor's report on the Marshals exists — the only auditor scrutiny this government's public-safety spending has faced landed on the wildfire-botched Public Safety Agency, not the gun-buying police force.

And this is the same cabinet that, last October, was on the defensive in the legislature over water bombers whose "contract... was never put out to a public tender," in NDP MLA Jordan McPhail's words — spending nobody was allowed to bid on, $100 million over what anyone could prove.

A government agency that doesn't track its costs, run by unsupervised goons who are trained to shoot to kill, overseen by politicians who don’t ask questions, was always going to end up quietly shopping for sniper rifles.

And sound cannons.

And a minister - again, Weyburn lawyer and MLA Michael Weger, for some reason - who says that he’ll personally sign off on any future specialized unit.

Sort of like a deadbeat dad promises to start watching the kids after they burn the house down.

A sound cannon is an acoustic weapon; a long-range acoustic (LRAD) device that can physically damage hearing, including the hearing of people who have nothing to do with whatever Scooter’s Marshals are pointing it at.

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Amrin Asfari, the law foundation chair in police studies at the University of Regina, noted every major force in this province, including Regina, Saskatoon, Prince Albert, and the RCMP, already has a tactical unit. Moe’s Marshal version would cost “potentially millions” to duplicate what already exists.

On the LRAD, Asfari’s verdict was “I don’t see a particularly useful application for this thing.”

So let’s answer the question the government won’t.

Who do they believe could eventually need to be controlled with a sound cannon in Saskatchewan?

Who is the enemy?

Rural thieves?

You catch those with warrants and seatbelt tickets and the rural crime teams — the Marshals already did that, legitimately, last month in Lloydminster, where a four-day joint operation with the RCMP executed 52 warrants. No sniper rifles or robot battering rams required from the Marshals.

The real, documented threats in this province are addictions, gangs, and inexplicably in its own birthplace, an unprecedented RCMP staffing crisis in Saskatchewan that Scott Moe’s government is deliberately further dismantling in order to build his own parallel force, one poached cop at a time.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but for the love of god, I wish they would:

A newly-formed, armed-government force that can’t name its adversary and stockpiles weapons anyway is a threat to every single citizen it’s sworn to protect.

Moe’s Marshal Service doesn’t need to find an enemy. It’ll make one. It’s positively salivating over the prospect.

This is the point where decent governments do the only responsible thing, and it’s the point where the decent people of Saskatchewan — the RCMP officers, the municipal mayors, the First Nations’ Chiefs, the union leaders, the 90 municipalities who’ve been ignored since 2024 — can stop this.

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Shut it down.

Not “pause.”

Not “review.”

Shut it DOWN.

Take the $20 million a year and spend it where the math actually works: fund new officers through the 70/30 RCMP federal cost-share. Newsflash: there’s just one taxpayer. The RCMP model gets Saskatchewan more boots on the ground for the same price tag. The model always made sense and still does.

Fund the effective addictions treatment programs we’re desperately short of, and fund the First Nations-led community safety models that the people who live here have been asking for since day one.

Release the 290 pages the Privacy Commissioner ordered public.

Let the ombudsman and the Public Complaints Commission do their jobs.

And answer the one question that’s been on the table unanswered since August 13: who authorized a “foundational” SWAT unit in a budget that no one in Scott Moe’s Cabinet knew existed?

If the answer is seriously “an overly-ambitious employee” - which it is - then Scott Moe and his government are unfit to certify a fucking parking lot, let alone a police force.

If the answer is “the Chief Marshal” authorized it without telling the Minister, which is not how the laws that govern Legislature work, then the public servant the Sask Party hired and kept in place has been running a secret armed program and needs to be fired immediately.

Because this is the Sask Party.

This is all political. It’s all power and control. I fully appreciate the RCMP can be real shitty at their jobs - there’s not a ton of love lost between me and the F Division. I have mouthed off more than one Saskatoon cop at a traffic stop. Pretty sure my CPIC is a dumpster fire.

All this to say, I would much, much rather dance with the devil I know.

If putting this inexperienced, witless former Sask Party golden boy turned failed candidate political hack at the helm (though they’re keeping him suspiciously quiet right now, which makes me wonder if he’s planning on running for the Saskatchewan Party again) wasn’t your first clue that there’s no seriousness or law enforcement sophistication here, I don’t know what would be.

Either way, the conclusion is the same.

You don’t get to run a police force by blaming a faceless employee.

You don’t get to protect Saskatchewan by hiding the report.

And you absolutely do not hand weapons to an agency that can’t name its enemy — because a government that doesn’t know what its own police force is doing, and arms itself to the teeth anyway, is the enemy.

It’s the only explanation left.

There’s no other reason to buy the guns.

There’s no other reason to hide the files.

And there’s no other reason to play dumb while it happens — except that for too many years now, playing dumb has been the entire strategy. A Premier or one of his ministers boldfaced lies to the cameras, or this case, and which is even worse, the latter is clearly suffering from a case of plausible deniability. The rot is inside the agency, because it knows absolutely nobody is at the wheel.

What is the saying?

Something about monkeys running the zoo?

Saskatchewan voters have not just allowed it, but endorsed it - what does that say about them? What is it going to say about those 90 municipal government if a single one of them votes Sask Party anyway?

Shut this Marshal service DOWN.

Before the first Saskatchewan family meets the point of that rifle on their own street, and finds out, too late, that the only thing Scott Moe really knows how to do is not take responsibility.

I’ve called “crazy” and endured far worse for pointing this out to you years ago - that this iteration of the Sask Party and its government (I’m not even condemning the party itself, just this iteration) was so insulated, greedy and corrupt.

That Saskatchewan residents, today’s and tomorrow’s, would pay a brutal price.

That the Saskatchewan media, not necessarily down to the reporter, but unequivocally at-large, has become complicit in the grift by putting the steady river of government ad dollars ahead of the integrity of their own newsrooms, when reporting (or more commonly, not reporting) on the state of the Government of Saskatchewan.

And what I’m observing now is a group of individuals coming up through Saskatchewan’s public service who have cut their teeth in this particularly toxic environment.

They’ve seen the cash kicked back.

They’ve seen how personally wealthy some, if not most, Sask Party Ministers have become while simultaneously serving as elected officials: ignoring, retracting or openly breaking every law, every rule and ethic our grandparents and great-grandparents voted to put in place to stop precisely all this from happening in Saskatchewan.

They’ve seen the lobby firms spring up, with government and political actors seamlessly moving from the public payroll to building incredible wealth off their access to the few big fish in this tiny pond.

They’ve seen, less than a year after leaving the office, a former Saskatchewan premier accept board positions, coupled with generous share offerings in companies he dealt with intimately as part of his elected role, rendering him a multimillionaire overnight.

No, we’re not talking about Lorne Calvert.

Every single one of these public servants have played the game, which included keeping their mouth shut and looking the other way.

And now they’re ready to have their turn at the trough.

They know the concept of government or political accountability in Saskatchewan has been reduced to non-existent, because they grew up under the architects of its demise. I firmly believe you’ll start seeing more of this - Sask Party cabinet ministers firmly, and credibly, pointing fingers and nameless, faceless civil servants - because they can. There’s no proper pushback.

Nameless, faceless civil servants, the sons and daughters of friends and donors, who the Sask Party government cannot and will not fire, not the least in part because they know too much.

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Saying these things plainly has not made me wealthy. It certainly hasn’t made me popular. I don’t think I’ve particularly changed much of anything. My refusal to endorse or give the Saskatchewan NDP a free pass on their own ineptness means my work isn unpopular across the political spectrum in Saskatchewan.

But I wouldn’t retract a word, because it means there’s at least one archive of the last decade. Of the terms of people who were chosen to serve Saskatchewan, but instead decided they owned it.

Have a great week!

<waves from another continent>

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What’s it going to take, Saskatchewan?

I mean, the complacency is understandable, to an extent.

Every year, the province’s Water Security Agency (WSA) rolls out its State of Drinking Water report, and every year the story is essentially the same: Saskatchewan water is safe, public confidence is strong, compliance is high, critical equipment is in order, and a 90,000 acre irrigation project is a really good idea.

In fact on paper, Saskatchewan’s water looks like the best-kept secret in Canadian water management.

The paper, it turns out, is forged.

For example, chlorine disinfection the last line of defence before boil-water orders. In 2023-24, disinfection compliance fell to 78.6 per cent, the only category that fell below 90.

The report said that only looks low because operators forgot to submit their numbers. Yet the same report also says “failure to maintain continuous chlorine disinfection” as one of the top three inspection failures that year, and six high-risk advisories were issued because disinfection was inadequate “for a significant period of time.”

Which is it, Water Security Agency?

Failed filings or an unprecedented drop in compliance? It’s not both.

I’m not going to get into the names of the bacterias and tests, because neither of us know what they are, but the pattern that’s emerged over the last five years of reporting from WSA is that if the compliance rate falls too low, they just remove the indicator from the report.

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This is the pattern I’ve been watching in this province for two decades: when the numbers threaten embarrass the Saskatchewan Party government, the measuring gets blamed, the yardstick declared faulty, the report shelved quickly.

Meanwhile, the taps in rural Saskatchewan tell a different story.

There were 912 precautionary drinking water advisories and boil-water orders numbered in 2021-22, fell for three straight years to 789, then bounced back to 865 in 2024-25.

E. coli has triggered emergency orders every year since 2019.

I didn’t go back any further.

Small Saskatchewan communities can’t afford the upgrades and can’t find certified operators to run what they have. The small systems regulated by the Saskatchewan Health Authority generate barely three per cent of the advisories, yet also account for 75 per cent of the boil-water orders in 2024-25.

In 2023-24, the WSA issued an emergency order for “suspected intentional contamination” of a community’s water system, but the agency’s report doesn’t name the community.

What?

That’s at least a year before the Town of Outlook, Saskatchewan, declared a local state of emergency and a "do not use" water order after a reservoir access hatch showed signs of tampering (though not contamination).

Earlier this year, the Provincial Auditor reported that the Water Security Agency still hasn’t dealt with five recommendations her office first made in 2020.

It isn’t properly recording licensed water use, it isn’t monitoring whether licence-holders obey their limits, and it isn’t enforcing its own laws.

105 licensed water users exceeded their allocations in the 2023-24 reporting year by enough to fill roughly 3,600 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The WSA took no compliance action — issued no fines — for 139 failed users, including 34 who weren’t even licensed to use the water in the first place.

The auditor’s words: licensees can violate their conditions “without consequence.”

And then there’s the threat the agency keeps announcing and never explaining: PFAS.

PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — are a family of more than 4,700 human-made chemicals. They’re the reason your non-stick pan doesn’t stick, your raincoat repels water. They’re the active ingredient in firefighting foam. They’re called “forever chemicals” because they don’t degrade, but literally last forever, in soil, in groundwater, and in your body. They’ve been linked to kidney and testicular cancer, thyroid disease, elevated cholesterol, and damage to the immune system and developing children.

The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that the most commonly found PFAS compounds can lower sperm count and cause smaller penis size. I don’t think there’s any more room for that in Saskatchewan, frankly.

Other research also draws possible links to infertility.

“We’re dealing with a case in Maine right now. PFAS is in the milk, it’s in the beef, it’s in the eggs. It’s happening in every state and community members are now calling me saying they’re sterile.” - environmental advocate and overall badass Erin Brockovich, March 2021, BBC

Almost every one of us carries PFAS in our blood.

The United States decided, in the end, not to wait for someone to finish studying this. In April 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the first-ever national drinking water standard for PFAS: enforceable limits so fine it’s like a drop in 20 Olympic pools. The EPA estimates the rule will stop PFAS exposure for about 100 million Americans.

Months later, the EPA designated PFAS as hazardous substances under the Superfund law, which means the polluters — not the ratepayers — can be made to pay for the cleanup. In fact just this week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the law, keeping the companies that make or even transport the chemicals on the hook for ‌potential cleanup costs in the future.

Then came the lawsuits.

In June 2023, 3M — the company that made the PFAS used in countless consumer products — agreed to pay $10.3 billion to public water systems in the United States. Weeks later, DuPont, Chemours and Corteva — the family of companies behind Teflon, the OG PFAS — agreed to a $1.185 billion settlement fund for public systems.

In April 2024, Tyco Fire Products and its parent Johnson Controls settled for $750 million over PFAS in firefighting foam. The state of New Jersey alone has now extracted roughly $2.5 billion in combined settlements, including a separate $450 million from 3M.

Now here’s the Saskatchewan part.

Health Canada has set a drinking water “objective” for PFAS of 30 nanograms per litre — seven and a half times looser than in the US. And it’s a guideline, not an enforceable standard. A recent Canadian survey found PFAS in roughly 85 per cent of Canadian municipal systems sampled, with readings creeping close to that federal ceiling.

Saskatchewan’s Water Security Agency has announced it’s studying PFAS three years running — “monitoring initiated” in 2022-23, “study initiated” in 2023-24, “planning studies” in 2024-25 — and has yet to publish a single result. No limits. No published data. No answers about whether Saskatchewan water sits at two parts per trillion or twenty-five.

Meanwhile, our provincial municipal water systems are sliding backward: 55 per cent of Saskatchewan’s waterworks saw their sustainability ratio fall and provincial government investment dropped 17 per cent last year to $102.9 million.

None of this stops crazyass-Scott Moe from planning to expand Lake Diefenbaker and add 90,000 acres of irrigation in the name of food security — pouring more water into fields under the governance of an agency that doesn’t bother managing the water it already licences.

The bullshit claim is the WSA aims to be the best water management agency in North America. The reality is a self-published report card, a redefined yardstick, and a pile of advisories nobody in authority seems worried about.

Oh and did I mention Cam Swan is interim president and CEO of the WSA?

You may remember Mr Swan from that time he was made Scott Moe’s second-in-command in 2018. I call Cam “The Cleaner”, because more recently he’s the guy who writes reports declaring the Saskatchewan Party has never done anything wrong, but we’re not allowed to read them.

Cam Swan plays a very specific role for the Sask Party, for which he is paid handsomely not with their money, but your tax dollars.

There’s only one reason Cam Swan has been parachuted into the WSA. It’s the same shit that’s happening at SaskPower, SaskTel and everything else that’s essential to life in Saskatchewan.

Saskatchewan is drying up, and we’re being served nonsense and paperwork instead of answers.

Go turn on your tap.

That’s what’s at stake, whether you grasp it right now or not. It’s just a fact that if we continue installing political hacks and liars in the Legislature, and at the helm of our public services, we’re going to lose those services. You can’t mismanage them forever.

There’s so much about Saskatchewan’s future that is now sadly inevitable. Does losing our drinking water really have to be one of them?

Is that what’s it going to take for Sask Party supporters to just… stop?

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OurSask Lives Because of Your Support

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Today I’ve removed the paywall, because this story deserves a wider audience:

In what I wrote, I traced how a fund built on secret Devine-era donations survived court battles, backroom sabotage, and decades of right-wing infighting… and why it still matters enormously to anyone trying to understand where Saskatchewan politics is actually heading.

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If you’ve been watching the fractures on the right and wondering what’s holding things together (or about to blow them apart), this is the missing piece. It always has been.

Because there’s a variable the old guard surely saw coming: the thousands of new Canadians who’ve been brought in by the Sask Party to settle across the province and build lives here, and who now deeply resent the fact that the Sask Party doesn’t want their membership.

That group is politically homeless, highly-motivated and well-organized.

So go read what I wrote, share it, and stay tuned. I haven’t decided if I will paywall the new information or not. It’s really something everyone who cares about the province should know, but paid subscribers keep this platform alive. Better join them to be sure you get the info either way:

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I’ll have more coming on how this story, including what happens when disenfranchised newcomers start looking for a political home on the right, is becoming more relevant to Saskatchewan’s future, not less, with every passing day.

But you have to understand the history of the PC Party of Saskatchewan’s finances, so first read what I just unlocked.

Talk soon. 😈

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OurSask Lives Because of Your Support

The next morning, some Sask Party supporter’s spawn in short pants and a government lanyard walks into your kid’s school and says, “I’m doing an inspection under the Saskatchewan Immigration Services Act. Hand me everything you have on this family.”

Until July 15, 2026, the school would have been able to stop and ask questions.

Now, the new rules force the school to say yes.

This is a change nobody is talking about, and we should be.

First, let’s be clear about who created this problem.

The Saskatchewan Party spent years demanding more immigrants.

Not because they had a plan to absorb them, but because they needed cheap labour to paper over the workforce gaps created by their supporters’ greed and which their own underfunded healthcare and trades training system couldn’t accommodate.

In 2022, Scott Moe’s government published the Saskatchewan Immigration Accord, a formal proposal to wrest control of immigration from Ottawa entirely and set the province’s own intake levels. They wanted 13,000 new immigrants per year through the Saskatchewan Immigrant Nominee Program (SINP).

Ottawa wouldn’t go that far (F*ck Trudeau, right?), but Moe and his sidekick, Jeremy Harrison, got a 42 per cent increase anyway, from Saskatchewan’s per capita quota of 6,000 nominations annually to approximately 18,000 newcomers over two years, including dependents.

What followed was predictable to the very few who were paying attention.

The pipeline the Sask Party built attracted predators.

In Humboldt and North Battleford, restaurant owners were charged in January 2026 with charging foreign workers illegal fees for employment, misrepresenting job opportunities, and threatening deportation without lawful cause. A Saskatoon consultant was convicted for counselling immigration misrepresentation, charging a Chinese family $40,000 for fake job offers and falsified pay stubs that went nowhere.

This problem goes back over a decade. It’s not new. In 2017, back when Geoff Leo was bothering himself with stories that mattered, or were at least about more than one person at a time, he revealed a fraud that until Saskatchewan cleared the path, only existed in immigration lore.

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““It’s almost the stuff of immigration legendary myth that there are envelopes of cash being passed around for offers of employment in Canada,” said the Vancouver-based lawyer and immigration policy analyst.

But he said a case CBC recently uncovered in Saskatchewan is “the first time on record someone was caught” — as he put it — “green-handed.”” - Undercover investigation unmasks cash-for-jobs Chinese immigration scheme, CBC.ca, June 19, 2017

Fake employer schemes.

Ghost consultants.

Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) fraud, resulting in the TFW crisis we have now.

The SINP’s rapid, uncontrolled expansion under camo-wearing, gun-totin Jeremy “Fudd” Harrison created a free and glorious market for scammers and con artists, and vulnerable people paid for it with their savings, their status, and in some cases their future in Canada.

Saskatchewan built the pipeline, cranked it open and then turned its back on the result.

And then there were the Ukrainians.

You’ve all figured out by now that few to none of these families were actually evacuated from Ukraine, right? They were already out - men legally and illegally - and settling into the vast space that exists for them in places like Poland the Czech Republic.

In 2022, the Sask Party government chartered five flights of supposedly displaced Ukrainians: photo ops in every press release; $335,000 in settlement supports announced with great fanfare; Scott Moe welcoming the newest members of the Saskatchewan family.

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About 8,000 Ukrainians eventually came to the province over the course of about six months.

Then, quietly, the government changed the SINP rules in a way that blocked many of them from accessing permanent residency. By February 2026, Ukrainians who had built lives here - working, paying taxes, enrolling kids in schools - discovered the path they were promised had been closed behind them.

Of course, the Sask Party blamed the feds, relying on that old chestnut to shut the ears and eyes of their devout following.

The NDP publicly demanded that Moe fix it. He refused, but only because he had no control over the changes, which trickled down from the feds. The Sask Party recruited these people like labour robots and then left them to rust in an immigration junkyard when it was inconvenient to follow through and take care of them.

This is the government that is now appointing “enforcement officers” to police the immigration system.

On July 15, 2026, Scott Moe’s Cabinet signed an Order In Council (OIC) amending The Local Authority Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Amendment Regulations, 2026.

It adds one line to a list of local public institutions that can legally hand your personal information to the Sask Party government.

The new line says your school board, hospital, municipality or any of dozens of other local bodies can now share your personal information with Government of Saskatchewan-appointed immigration directors and “enforcement officers” working under Saskatchewan’s Immigration Services Act.

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This impacts you. Anyone in Saskatchewan whose name, address, employment record, school record, or health file sits in a public body’s database.

That’s most of us.

The institutions on the hook to do the handing-over:

• Every school board in the province

• Every regional health authority, including the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency

• Every city, town, village and rural municipality

• Every post-secondary institution

• Every library board, police commission

If you’ve ever registered a child for school, attended a hospital, paid property tax, or applied for a municipal program, your personal information lives in one of these files.

Saskatchewan’s Local Authority Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (LA FOIP) is the rulebook designed to keep your information private.

Section 28(2)(g) of that Act now says a local body may give personal information to a law enforcement agency when the head of the institution has “reasonable grounds” to believe the disclosure is needed for the enforcement of laws.

The word “may” is important. It is not “must.” The institution still has to make a judgement.

But here is the new piece: a Saskatchewan government immigration director or enforcement officer is now officially on the list of bodies deemed law enforcement in Saskatchewan.

This is where it gets stupider.

Saskatchewan’s Immigration Services Act, passed in 2024 and in force since July 1, 2025, sets up a whole provincial immigration machine. The Act creates two titles: “director” and “enforcement officer”, both appointed by the provincial minister - right now loyal Scott Moe bootlicker Eric Schmalz.

Schmalz’s “enforcement” officials can walk into any office, or any place of business, no warrant needed. Once in the door, they can demand records, contracts and employee files. They are allowed to share whatever they collect with anyone Scott Moe’s Cabinet approves.

My favourite part is the Act grants Saskatchewan’s immigration “enforcers” broad legal immunity when they act in “good faith”.

Refer a friend

What “enforcers” cannot do: decide anyone’s immigration status, deport anyone, or arrest anyone for being in Canada without papers. That is still a federal job held by the Canada Border Services Agency under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

If this is sounding familiar, it should.

This is the Saskatchewan version of ICE.

Not the name, not the federal jurisdiction, not the deportation authority… but the architecture. Enforcement officers who can walk into any workplace without a warrant, demand records, share what they collect with whoever the Cabinet approves, and claim immunity because they were acting in "good faith."

That is the ICE playbook.

Saskatchewan didn't invent this.

They copied it, stripped out the deportation power, and handed the keys to Eric Schmalz. The fact that they can't put anyone on a plane doesn't make the infrastructure less dangerous.

It makes it more insidious, because infrastructure built to track immigrants can be turned on anyone, for anything, with no one watching.

Doesn’t matter where you were born.

Before this OIC, if a law enforcement official - aka “a cop” - walked into your school and asked for your personal records, the school would have to look at the law, look at the request, and decide whether it qualified as a real law-enforcement request.

There was an established gatekeeper: the head of the institution had to be satisfied on reasonable grounds that disclosure was necessary. Now there’s a pre-printed short list that says: yes, this kind of request qualifies. The named officials count as a “law enforcement agency” by default.

What the new rules do not require:

• A court order

• A subpoena

• A warrant

• A written request with reasons

• A review by the Information and Privacy Commissioner

• Any independent check that the person asking is actually who they say they are

• Any notice to the person whose records are being handed over

• Any record of what was disclosed

The Act says immigration directors and enforcement officers must carry a Government identification card and produce it on request. That is the only protection. A Sask Party government-issued lanyard and a verbal assertion that an “inspection” is happening.

When any kind of provincial government-appointed “enforcer” has the power of the state and no requirement to put anything in writing, we have a recipe for disaster. Wrong person. Wrong disclosure. No record. No review. No way for the affected resident to even know it happened.

It also duplicates work Canada already does.

Canada already has CBSA officers, RCMP, and IRCC staff doing immigration enforcement work. Saskatchewan is now paying - out of our shrinking pot of provincial tax dollars - to set up a parallel provincial immigration inspection office to police the exact same recruiters, consultants, employers and immigrants.

That is what “duplication of tax dollars” looks like.

Sask Party MLAs should be asked, on the record: wtf is this buying us that we didn’t already have?

In a real government, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General would publish a written accountability framework, including who pays damages when the request turns out to be wrong, who logs disclosures, and who audits the data flow each year.

I guarantee our AG doesn’t even know about this change, or at the very least, paid any attention to it.

The Minister of Immigration and Career Pathways should publish the list of appointed immigration directors and “enforcers”, with their photos, appointment dates and the agency rule that names them. We are damn well entitled to know who holds these new powers.

Every school board, health region and municipal council in Saskatchewan should vote, this fall, on a written policy: before any data leaves the building under this new clause, the request must be in writing, the ID must be checked against the public register, the head of the institution must sign off, and a public disclosure log must be kept.

Without that policy, this change becomes a snitch-driven regime with no audit trail.

Section 95 of the Constitution Act, 1867 does let a province legislate on immigration. But the constitution doesn’t say you have to do it without adult supervision or a scintilla of integrity.

Saskatchewan residents deserve at least that much.

What they’re getting instead is governance by signature.

This is not new.

For years - really, since COVID - Scott Moe’s Cabinet has been quietly rewriting the rules of daily life in Saskatchewan through Orders in Council and regulatory amendments.

These are changes that affect your healthcare, your privacy, your employment, your children’s schools — and none of it requires a vote in the Legislative Assembly. No debate. No committee review. No public consultation. No scrutiny from Opposition MLAs.

Just a Cabinet meeting, a signature, and a posting in places no one (except yours truly) reads.

This is how authoritarian governance works.

Not always through dramatic power grabs.

More often through the slow, boring accumulation of regulatory authority: small changes, buried in legalese, dropped on a Tuesday, forgotten by Wednesday. The people who use this playbook understand that democracy’s real weakness isn’t elections. It’s passiveness. Do enough small things quietly, and by the time anyone notices what’s been built, the architecture is already in place.

The OIC that just gave Sask Party-government appointed “enforcement officers” access to your school records, your health files, and your municipal data didn’t make headlines.

It wasn’t supposed to.

That’s the point.

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OurSask Lives Because of Your Support

Fine. That is the official story.

But governments do not acquire “longstanding friends” in Washington by accident, and they certainly do not maintain them on sentiment alone.

They acquire them the old-fashioned way: through retainers, lobbyists, and your tax dollars.

Here’s the official reason Scott Moe spent more of your money on useless travel, once again to appease Trump-bootlickers:

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In a Court of King’s Bench decision we received yesterday afternoon, Kevin Doherty’s application to have me found in contempt of court, over what I wrote about the mediation process we went through last fall - was dismissed without costs.

It matters legally, and it matters personally.

In his filing, Doherty was demanding $5,000 cash from me as penance, and asking the Court to make me take down my allegedly contemptuous post about him.

Out of an abundance of caution and to show respect to the courts pending potential charges, I unpublished that piece.

It’s back up now; you can find it here:

This contempt action was piled onto Doherty’s original lawsuit filed against me for defamation, which had already cost ten thousand of your generously donated dollars to defend:

Kevin Doherty’s accusation that I was in contempt of Court was serious.

The legal test for contempt is precise AF.

To prove contempt of court, Kevin Doherty’s lawyers had to show "beyond a reasonable doubt" that not only did I violate a court order or law, but I did so knowingly and deliberately.

They failed.

The legislation and rules dealing with the mandatory mediation in Saskatchewan courts do not create the kind of broad, express public-silencing rule that would be needed to ground a contempt finding.

The judge’s ruling makes clear that if a court is going to brand someone in contempt, the law they are said to have broken must be unmistakably clear. In my case, the judge found that no such law existed to ground a finding of contempt.

That is not a technicality. That is the legal standard, and it exists for a reason.

Judges do not impose findings like contempt casually, because they should not. It is one of the Court’s most serious enforcement powers. It is not supposed to rest on assumption, implication, or vague understandings about what someone “must have known.”

That is why Doherty’s application was dismissed.

So yes, I am going to enjoy this win — because it is one.

At the same time, I want to be fair and precise about what this decision does and does not say. The judge did not say that “Tammy Robert was right to publish this.” However, it makes it clear that despite the important reasons for mediation confidentiality in general, there was no legal basis for finding that my actions in this case were contemptuous.

For me, this ruling is significant for another reason: it is a reminder that to the Saskatchewan courts, process is not substitute for proof. If someone is prepared to make serious allegations with criminal connotations, they must have the solid facts that meet the legal test.

On this one, Kevin Doherty did not make the grade.

And now we move on to his next.

The underlying defamation case that Doherty SLAPPed me with still lies ahead, and that is where the central issues will have to be confronted directly. That is where the evidence matters most. That is where his claims will stand or fall.

The next phase of this fight lies ahead. For that, now we prepare.

I get to say “we”, because the Substack Defender program has taken the financial burden of lawfare off my shoulders.

Prior to that, I had fundraised for my initial retainer.

To date I haven’t needed to spend a dime of my own money on anything Kevin Doherty has put in front of me.

Pretty sure that wasn’t what was supposed to happen.

My lawyer, Tavengwa Runyowa, has defended me carefully yet tenaciously. He jumped into my case without hesitation, on short notice and I am super grateful for both Tav and his associate, Brandon Cain. When you need a firm truly in your corner, I can’t recommend them enough.

Meantime, I will allow myself this moment. I am pleased. I am relieved. I am ready for the next stage, ready for the public record to develop, ready for Doherty’s claims to be tested in court. Ready for the truth to be examined where it actually matters.

Not because litigation is easy, or because conflict is pleasant, but because there comes a point where the only thing left to do is meet someone head-on. We are there now. Let’s get it done.

I won’t pretend otherwise: I can’t wait.

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OurSask Lives Because of Your Support

On Monday afternoon the RCMP did its job and sent out its news release, confirming Rider captain Jayden Dalke was driving the wrong way on the highway with alcohol and cannabis in his vehicle before the crash that killed both him and 22-year-old Regina resident Bhishma Rajyaguru.

Like I said in what I wrote above: “…let’s be clear - (Just Bins) might be right.”

Mr Snook is now taking something that appears to be a victory lap.

He’s also very, very butthurt by the likes of myself and others who’ve told Adam Snook and his clownish company to get back into their lane.

You know they’re serious when they use that 2018 photo of me lolol.

Adam, you go ahead and hold your breath for that apology. You know it’s not coming, because you understood exactly what the point was and it hasn’t changed: you and your garbage company have no business spreading irresponsible, unverified information on life and death to the Saskatchewan public - even when you’re right.

There is no benefit to Saskatchewan people derived from a garbage company posing as a news provider.

I actually can’t believe I just had to type that.

And the reckless Saskatchewan residents who sent Snook their “tips”, instead of the RCMP or a real newsroom backed by legal and moral standards, should be ran out of this province on a rail.

The chaos that all this has caused is abhorrent - and so very Saskatchewan.

In November 2025 alone, Saskatchewan RCMP police officers responded to 11 fatal motor-vehicle collisions resulting in the death of 11 people on Saskatchewan roads. People die on Saskatchewan highways all the time.

Absolutely no elected officials acknowledged any of those deaths, especially by name.

The Riders were extremely premature in releasing their tribute to Jayden - that is a fact. Then attention-whoring politicians like NDP Opposition Leader Carla Beck and of course, Scott Moe, were quick to jump in, dramatically echoing their sincere condolences solely for Dalke, no mention of his victim.

So yes, the Riders fucked up.

However, when that kind of sudden and abrupt pain rips through any organization, not even its leadership stops to think clearly.

I am, at heart, a risk and crisis communicator. I do this for a living - outside of Saskatchewan. What should have happened is this:

1. The Riders would have chosen a sole employee as the point person for managing the crisis externally (internal management of a crisis should be someone else entirely and should essentially only involve a boatload of therapists for players and staff).

2. That external point person would then identify the other stakeholders in the crisis. In this case that would be the Riders CEO, Saskatchewan RCMP, Lumsden first responders, a point person from the Dalke family and one from the victim’s family.

3. An extremely painful but necessary internal call would have been held around noon on Sunday with all stakeholders, including the RCMP. If the other victim’s representative hadn’t been found yet, or they’d declined to participate, that’s fine.

4. At that meeting everyone would have learned about the drugs and alcohol in Dalke’s vehicle, and some very difficult calls would need to be made on messaging. That does not mean, however, that the Riders wouldn’t issue a statement - but they would have waited.

5. Monday morning, the Riders and the RCMP would have held a news conference. I’m not going to work for free, but here’s an example of what could have, arguably should have come from the mouth of either Craig Reynolds or Corey Mace:

We lost one of our own over the weekend, and our hearts are broken.

Jayden Dalke was our captain — on the field and off it. He brought energy into every room he walked into, pushed his teammates to be better, and represented this club with pride. He was 30 years old. Gone far too soon.

The circumstances of his death are painful in ways that are hard to put into words right now. If the RCMP’s investigation confirms what is being reported, then Jayden’s decision that night caused another person’s death — and that truth must sit alongside our grief, not beneath it.

We have reached out to the other victim’s family directly. We intend to support them in whatever way they will allow.

To our players, our staff, and our fans who are hurting this morning — we see you. Grief is not simple here, and we won’t pretend it is. Counselling is available to all team personnel, effective immediately.

We have no further comment while investigations are ongoing.

But they didn’t.

And now a bunch of politicians are trying to make up for it by grotesquely, obscenely and overtly falling all over themselves to acknowledge the death of Bhishma Rajyaguru. There’s a Go Fund Me here, if you can spare anything, to bring Bhishma’s body back to his parents in India.

This is such a debacle.

But what Mr Snook is projecting about himself with his ghoulish behaviour is plain for everyone to see - I don’t need to explain it. What he doesn’t grasp is just as obvious as his insecurities:

Just Bins is a symptom in Saskatchewan, not the disease.

And someday, it will be a footnote in this - one of the most shameful periods in Saskatchewan’s history - which has revealed a province lacking leadership, class, tact, empathy, compassion and common sense.

Time to do better. Everyone.

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OurSask Lives Because of Your Support

He was just 30 years old.

The team announced his death in a statement Sunday afternoon.

Another story broke Sunday afternoon, that of a collision between two vehicles, on the highway between Lumsden and Regina, in which two people died.

“They found one vehicle in the centre median and another in the southbound ditch, according to a Sunday news release.” - CBC.ca

So that’s what we know about the facts today.

This is where Just Bins comes into play.

First, let me start by issuing a hearty “you’re welcome” to Adam Snook for giving his company exposure, because I’m quite certain that vast swaths of my audience will have never heard of it.

It’s a trade-off I considered before writing. I’m fine with it. The old saying “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” is 100 percent not a thing anymore and anyone who thinks it is… well, probably also believes Just Bins is edgy and important.

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Let me tell you what Just Bins actually is, so we’re not confused about what we’re talking about, because I’m not going to go as far as linking to his platforms.

Just Bins Waste Disposal is, as the name might suggest, a garbage bin rental company in Regina. Six, twelve, and twenty-four cubic yard dumpsters. Regina man Adam Snook founded the company in 2009, handed it off to a friend, moved to Alberta to chase oil money, came back when the oil money dried up, and re-purchased Just Bins in 2018ish.

Have you ever seen a more Saskatchewan couple in your life?

According to him, Snook couldn’t compete on price with the bigger players, so he lowered the bar on everything else by posting memes - tacky, grainy iPhone footage of some of Regina’s most vulnerable citizens - to his company’s social media channels.

Saskatchewan’s many bored minds, cynical, and endlessly amused by anything that punches at the province’s inferiority complex, followed him like the sheep they are.

Then the flock grasped the business model and started sending Adam Snook their own garbage… which he happily picks up for free.

Which brings us back to the collision near Lumsden and death of Jayden Dalke and one other man.

Saturday evening and throughout the day Sunday, Snook started posting screenshots of messages he’d received from alleged “eyewitnesses”. These included various allegations about Jayden Dalke’s condition and the way he was driving, prior to the accident.

Just Bins also posted a photo of what is allegedly Dalke’s vehicle shortly after the accident. It’s in the ditch resting on its driver’s side, a sheet draped over the front windshield to cover what is likely his dead body.

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See, today Just Bins’ is infamous not for its “news”, but for its posts glorifying footage of people who are visibly intoxicated, in mental health crisis, homeless, or even dead - their dignity and Saskatchewan’s completely disregarded. Then of of course, Snook’s followers’ comments become a flaming dumpster fire of their own, degrading and mocking our friends and family at the lowest points in their life..

Snook flies a drone over active crime scenes in violation of Transport Canada rules, and the Regina Police Service has flagged it as a safety and privacy concern.

The content published on Just Bins’ is virtually guaranteed to generate outrage and contempt. His Dalke posts have caused chaos online, in the community, in Rider Nation. They have possibly tanked at least one dead man’s reputation while minimizing the death of another.

There is no accountability for the damage caused by a wound that’s not new. It’s been festering now for too many years. In fact, we keep sticking our fingers in it and making it worse.

Adam Snook runs his company’s social media accounts with 132,000 followers lapping up degrading content of a city of 250,000.

Think about that.

He is reaching, by some estimates, more people than any other single Saskatchewan news source — while operating with zero editorial standards, zero corrections policy, zero accountability to any professional or public interest obligation.

In fact, Just Bins social media channels skew hard toward the same populist, right-wing grievance culture that helped hollow out the Saskatchewan institutions Snook seems to believe he’s replacing.

It’s understandable why Snook might think he’s something he’s not.

In 2023, enough people were treating Adam Snook as their primary source of local news that when Prairie Dog Magazine - an established Regina newspaper - ran its “Best of Regina” reader poll, Just Bins’ fans flooded the site. Snook won the Best Online News and Best Social Media categories, beating out longtime, established local journalists and newsrooms.

Those votes were undoubtedly real, pumped by Snooks’ fans. Instead of disallowing Just Bins to appear in, at least, the “Online News” category, Prairie Dog’s editor made a critical error in judgment that essentially nailed shut Saskatchewan’s media coffin. Just Bins celebrated their Prairie Dog “win” with a line of merch and letting their comments section fill with posts celebrating the death of Saskatchewan’s mainstream media.

Prairie Dog Magazine removed their Best Online News category after Just Bins won it in a landslide. Then Prairie Dog Magazine folded altogether.

That is not a quirky footnote. That is a small, quiet, precise symbol of exactly what Just Bins is doing to the information ecosystem of this city: making the real thing seem pointless by replacing it with something louder, uglier and stupider.

Yet if you’ve heard anything about Just Bins, that’s like a synopsis of the story you’ve probably heard: framed as just more quirky Saskatchewan weirdness.

A Saskatchewan garbage company accidentally became a news outlet… isn’t that something? The underdog finally getting a win around here.

No. Fucking stop.

That framing lets everyone off the hook, which we all deserve to be hanging from.

Because here is what actually happened.

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Saskatchewan spent twenty years systematically destroying the conditions under which serious local journalism could exist. Not through some coordinated conspiracy, through something more honest and more damning: indifference.

People cancelled subscriptions to the Star Phoenix and Leader-Post because it was cheaper not to pay. Advertisers followed eyeballs to Facebook. Postmedia gutted its newsroom, then gutted it again, and the Saskatchewan editor literally lives somewhere else now.

The media industry in Saskatchewan has been double-tapped by the fact our population has never and will never grow enough so that what’s left of traditional media companies will fund operations here again.

CTV Regina is a skeleton. The CBC, which Saskatchewan conservatives have spent a generation demanding be defunded, has been gutted by the very austerity politics those same people cheered.

Rawlco Radio — which I know intimately, having worked there for four years — has spent decades shaping Saskatchewan’s political conversation toward a particular kind of Saskatchewan grievance mode that feels like thinking without actually requiring any.

Everybody knows this, yet here’s Rawlco’s longtime news director and Temu-Anchorman Murray Wood recently gaslighting himself, his staff and whatever’s left of his audience:

“… a different story in Saskatchewan.”

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Delusional.

The information ecosystem in this province didn’t collapse.

It was abandoned.

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The accident involving Jayden Dalke is going to be a hell of a litmus test for where this province’s moral compass really sits. Two men are dead. One is Dalke, the other appears to be a new Canadian, who was supposedly driving back to Regina on Saturday evening after working in Saskatoon.

Just Bins, through its pattern of publishing unverified information and tons of innuendo, has already loudly declared “what happened”.

And let’s be clear - he might be right.

That’s where Saskatchewan’s communications immaturity comes into play.

There’s no doubt the Roughriders had to issue a statement about Dalke’s death, quickly - but not that quickly. I’m loathed to believe all they heard was “car accident” before writing a tribute that ushered Dalke unequivocally into sainthood. Similar tributes immediately also came flying in from across the CFL, sports broadcasters and of course, Scott Moe.

Keeping in mind that there were two victims of this collision, everyone could have waited at least 24 fucking hours before saying anything.

With the exception of the Saskatchewan RCMP, who should have had a detailed statement issued by 6AM Sunday morning.

They are also a huge part of the problem.

Because the Saskatchewan RCMP is not only one of the worst law enforcement agencies in North America for promoting censorship, but has made the unthinkable, frankly frightening demand that media outlets ask them for permission before reporting facts from crime scenes.

That demand is not merely inappropriate; it is a direct affront to the basic principles of freedom of speech and an informed Saskatchewan public.

The RCMP do not exist to license journalism, and the idea that reporters must seek law enforcement approval before sharing facts with the public being served is chilling. It invites censorship, suppresses scrutiny, and creates the message that information belongs first to the cops, rather than to the public the RCMP serves.

In a democracy, media outlets are meant to question authority, not submit to it, and any attempt by the Saskatchewan RCMP to place themselves between the facts and the public is deeply dangerous.

But maybe that doesn’t matter either anymore, as it appears the broader Saskatchewan audience has decided that being entertained is the same as being informed.

Into that vacuum walked a man selling dumpsters.

The reality is Regina residents were starved for something that felt local, immediate, and unfiltered, and Snook built a product that delivered exactly that to 132,000 people. Nobody else, including myself, has been able to do better. No one in Saskatchewan’s independent media has that kind of audience.

It seems too many Saskatchewan people prefer garbage.

God knows Snook is not pretending to be a journalist. His own bio says he’s a garbage company that reposts memes. The cynicism is right there in the branding: “R\*gina,” the asterisk, a wink at the city’s unfortunate name.

Adam Snook knows exactly who and what he is.

What he also knows exactly who and what Saskatchewan is.

He knows exactly what he’s projecting when he posts references to “child tax cheques” and videos of Indigenous people drinking or fighting - the same racist trash I heard from my racist white trash family living in northern Saskatchewan, ever since I was a kid.

Well not anymore, because I haven’t spoken to them since they were the only people protesting the “jab” in their town. I think my uncle was standing on a street corner holding a horse tranquilizer?

Lol. Trash… and huge Just Bins fans.

Saskatchewan audiences have now been trained their whole lives to distrust the “other”. Nobody cares when “those people”, often brown-skinned and at their lowest moments, are dangled and mocked by thousands of strangers. John Gormley built a career out of it. Every provincial politician who ever ran against “Trudeau’s CBC” or “the elites” or “the mainstream media” or Scott Moe’s constant bitching and whining was writing Snook’s business plan for him.

The anti-establishment reflex in this province is so thoroughly broken that people will hand their understanding of their own city to a garbage man and truly believe they’re progressive.

This is not journalism filling a gap.

The hunger in Saskatchewan for real, trustworthy information is legitimate.

What’s being fed to it is not.

There is a difference between raw footage of an emergency scene and understanding what caused it, what should change, and who is accountable.

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Conversely, Saskatchewan has a deep, abiding suspicion of anything that looks like it’s telling people what to think. I understand it. I grew up in it. I live it today.

This thinking has legitimate roots in a province that spent decades being lectured by Ottawa, by eastern media, by national institutions that didn’t know or care what Saskatchewan actually looked like, besides flat.

Today that reflex has been so thoroughly weaponized - by radio hosts, by politicians, by the entire gong show that is western Canada’s grievance politics - that it now functions as immunization against critical thought itself.

The moment anyone points at Just Bins and says ”this is not journalism,” a thousand voices rise up to howl ”the mainstream media is corrupt anyway” and ”at least Just Bins shows what’s really happening” and ”you just hate that people found an alternative.”

That response is not skepticism.

It is pure outrage theatre.

Real skepticism would ask: who is Adam Snook, what does he believe, what is he selecting and why, what is he leaving out, and what does he want me to feel when I’m done scrolling?

The comfortable version — the version that 132,000 people have chosen — is to call it “refreshingly honest” and click Follow.

The garbage is winning.

And the people of Saskatchewan handed it the keys.

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That’s what the Just Bins mirror actually says about Saskatchewan.

About us.

It’s okay if this stings a little.

It should.

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Tens of thousands of people read this work every month.

Thousands of you have subscribed for free, and I’m grateful for every one of you. This kind of Saskatchewan political analysis doesn’t exist anywhere else, and I want you to read it.

But a fraction of that readership is paying, and without paid subscribers and direct donations, this work doesn’t survive.

I’m not going to put wildfire accountability reporting behind a paywall. People in northern Saskatchewan communities deserve to know what their government did and didn’t do, and that information should be freely available. But freely available doesn’t mean it costs nothing to produce.

If this work matters to you, a paid subscription is the absolute best way to show it.

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Thank you.

Now — to the matter at hand.

I published a column two days ago, before the Provincial Auditor tabled her report.

I raised a question that I believe every Saskatchewan person reading about wildfire accountability should have front of mind: Tara Clemett is the Provincial Auditor of Saskatchewan. Her husband, Christopher Clemett, is the Executive Director of Engagement and Enterprise Projects at the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency — the very agency whose catastrophic 2025 wildfire response she has now spent months auditing.

I asked what disclosures were made. I asked whether recusal standards existed or were applied. I noted that her office had audited SPSA-related functions repeatedly — emergency planning coordination (2022), public alerting and wildfire detection (2023), 911 call-taking and fire dispatching (2024) — domains that overlap with her husband’s executive role.

I noted that Trent Wotherspoon, chair of the Public Accounts Committee and the man who publicly welcomed both Tara and Christopher Clemett into the Legislature in November 2021, has remained publicly silent on this.

I emailed both of them. Tara Clemett and Trent Wotherspoon.

Neither has replied.

The silence is not personally insulting to me. I’ve been ignored by more important people than these two, and I’ll survive it.

But it should insult you.

You, the person reading this, who pays taxes in this province, who may have been evacuated from your home last summer, who watched the government spend $350 million responding to a wildfire crisis that its own audits confirm was years in the making.

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The Provincial Auditor’s office exists to serve the Legislative Assembly — which means it exists to serve you. If the watchdog’s independence is a legitimate public concern, and it is, then the watchdog owes the public an explanation.

Not a reporter. Not an MLA. You.

The silence from Wotherspoon is its own story. He chairs the committee. He could have raised this. He didn’t. I’ve written before about why the Sask Party let him have that job. His weakass silence is my answer.

The Provincial Auditor’s Chapter 5, tabled Tuesday, June 23, 2026, examines SPSA’s resource planning for wildfire response. It is thorough, it is damning, and in key ways it confirms — through official, institutional language — exactly what the MNP independent review said on June 12 and what people who paid attention already knew.

Here is what the auditor found, in plain terms:

The SPSA has gone more than $70 million over budget on wildfire response in each of the last three years. Rather than adjust the budget to reflect reality, the agency submitted essentially the same budget request year after year while the province burned progressively more. In 2025, the total bill topped $350 million. The approved budget before the 2025 wildfire season started covered just 20 per cent of final actual costs.

This speaks to what I say every year - Sask Party budgets are a joke. A work of fiction, not worth the paper its written on. They configure budgets to make themselves look good, not for any mature or responsible purpose.

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The agency spent $26.3 million on contracted firefighters and aircraft in 2025 alone — compared to $1.9 million in 2024 and $521,000 in 2023. Those contracted personnel cost between two and five times more than SPSA’s own employees. Short-term helicopter contracts cost 35 per cent more than long-term agreements. The auditor’s office calculated that a single additional long-term helicopter contract could have saved approximately $500,000.

Contracted personnel took an average of 15 days to arrive after being requested. In 76 per cent of cases, they didn’t arrive when they were needed. The agency, meanwhile, couldn’t tell the auditor’s office when most of those resources had even been requested — because it doesn’t track it.

The SPSA couldn’t produce a complete list of the Type 1 and Type 2 firefighters who fought fires in 2025. Their own workforce. The people they deployed into active wildfire zones. No central tracking. No complete record. The auditor notes this raises “the risk the Agency deploys firefighters to fight fires without sufficient training, putting those firefighters and others at risk of serious harm.”

The initial attack success rate — the percentage of fires kept under 10 hectares before they become monsters — fell from 77 per cent in 2022 to 70 per cent in 2025. The agency has no formal measure for this. It doesn’t set a target. It doesn’t track it as a performance indicator. It just watches more fires escape containment year after year and submits the same staffing plan.

Twenty-one of 89 northern communities identified as high wildfire risk still have no wildfire preparedness plan.

Communities that were staring down active fire fronts last summer.

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No plan.

Compare this to what MNP told us on June 12.

MNP found the SPSA “was not fully prepared” for 2025, that coordination between agencies was a mess, that evacuation orders were delayed and inconsistent, that procurement was reactive with no pre-season contracts for heavy equipment, that the SPSA couldn’t account for equipment that went missing during deployments.

MNP found 700 structures lost province-wide. Denare Beach — half a village gone. Saskatchewan’s ombudsman, Sharon Pratchler, separately concluded that the SPSA was slow in its evacuation response, leaving displaced residents without shelter, without food support, and without clear direction.

The auditor’s report adds the financial architecture underneath all of that.

It answers the question: how did we get here?

The auditor’s 11 recommendations are reasonable and necessary. Develop a real resource plan. Fix the budget. Track your contractors. Centrally monitor training. Work with Finance on a realistic funding model. Make sure at-risk communities have preparedness plans.

The SPSA’s Volume 2 audit, covering the $187-million air tanker procurement — the deal critics say cost Saskatchewan taxpayers $100 million too much, amid allegations the tendering process was flawed — hasn’t been released yet. That comes in December.

And the person who will author it is the same person whose husband holds a senior executive director’s position at the agency being examined.

I am not alleging corruption. I am not claiming the 2026 audit findings are predetermined. I am saying what I said yesterday: the appearance of independence is not optional for a legislative auditor. It is the whole job.

Refer a friend

And Saskatchewan’s institutions appear to have decided, collectively and quietly, that this particular conflict didn’t need to be disclosed to the people it was supposed to protect.

The emails to Clemett and Wotherspoon remain unanswered.

I’ll let you know if that changes.

For now, let’s have a look at what real wildfire management looks like:

There’s only two roads in the above photo. Everything else a fire break. The brown scars are burned forest.

Sitting on the shore of that lake, a small suburb, protected. Nothing burned.

Further south, on the exact same lake, same thing:

If I had to guess, I’d tell you at least three out of four properties at Little Bear Lake are recreational properties.

Second homes, the size of which make your only home look like a shed.

Not one building at Little Bear Lake burnt down.

Further north (but not that much further) is what’s left of the community of Denare Beach.

Here’s my question.

How in the fucking fuck did Saskatchewan’ Public Safety Agency know how to do wildfire management so good that they managed to protect every precious shingle at Little Bear Lake in 2025… but Denare Beach got nothing and burned to the ground?

I mean, Saskatchewan isn’t the type of place where the government would order no-holds barred protection for a bunch of cabins owned by Scott Moe’s rich friends while ignoring everybody else, right?

RIGHT?!

Here’s me, wondering if the Saskatchewan Auditor would bring up Little Bear Lake as an example of how Saskatchewan’s Public Safety Agency, which was directly involved, did indeed know how to do wildfire management, almost perfectly, during the 2025 wildfire season.

It just didn’t, for some reason, know how to do it anywhere besides Little Bear Lake.

How about you answer your emails Trent and Tara, k?

Cause this isn’t going away.

The Little Bear Lake phenomenon has been quietly simmering for a year. I remember when it was happening and even Sask Party supporters were quietly covering their eyes in horror. There’s knowledge out there of who made what calls and when, to ensure LBL was saved. One of those men is Marlo Pritchard, who didn’t lose his job, even though he would have anywhere else in the developed world.

It’s all such a mystery, right?

LOL.

We’ll talk about it more soon. I’m going to have to start pulling land titles like crazy, which is not cheap, so feel free to cruise back up to the top of this post and chip in so we can find out exactly who got lucky last year, as opposed to who lost everything.

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Editor’s note: This column does not allege corruption, bad faith, or a predetermined audit outcome. It argues that where Saskatchewan’s Provincial Auditor is auditing a public agency in which her husband holds a senior executive director’s position, the Saskatchewan public is entitled to a full public explanation of what was disclosed, what safeguards were used, and whether recusal occurred.

Let’s go straight to the facts.

Tara Clemett is the Provincial Auditor of Saskatchewan.

“By sharing our audits’ results, we provide assurance and advice to the Legislative Assembly and the public on the management, governance, and effective use of public resources. This fosters accountability and transparency with respect to Government performance, systems, and practices.” - auditor.sk.ca, Home Page

She’s recently announced she’s going to investigate two of the most politically explosive files in the province: Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency’s now confirmed mishandling of the 2025 wildfire season and the agency’s roughly $187-million Conair aircraft purchase, alleged to be an inside deal, $100-million overpriced.

She’s going to analyze how the failures of the SPSA - meaning the failures of the people at the top of the SPSA - led to the catastrophic, preventable, unnecessary destruction of Saskatchewan property, livelihoods, and natural resources.

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Christopher Clemett is the Executive Director of “Engagement and Enterprise Projects” at the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency. According to his LinkedIn, he got this promotion in October 2021, smack in the middle of the covid crisis.

Christopher Clemett is Tara Clemett’s husband.

And spare us the polite fiction that nobody noticed.

Once month after her husband was promoted to executive director of a critical provincial government agency, Tara Clemett was promoted from Acting Provincial Auditor to the permanent job. On November 9, 2021, Trent Wotherspoon, as chair of the Public Accounts Committee, stood in the Legislature and welcomed not only Tara Clemett but “her husband, Mr. Chris Clemett.”

That is on the record.

The relationship was not some hidden biographical detail buried in a shoebox.

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The issue is not merely about the two current SPSA wildfire audits. It is that the Saskatchewan public, including yours truly, have spent years treating SPSA audits as institutionally pristine. Instead, the Auditor was auditing an agency where her husband held a senior executive role — and the public was never given a clear, contemporaneous explanation of disclosure, recusal, or safeguards.

Tara Clemett’s office has turned its attention to the SPSA and its related public-safety functions again and again.

In 2022, her office reported on SPSA’s role in coordinating provincial emergency planning.

In 2023, she reported on SPSA’s processes for alerting the public about imminently dangerous events and on SPSA’s processes for detecting wildfires.

In 2024, she reported on SPSA’s 911 call-taking and dispatching for fire emergencies.

They are precisely the kinds of “engagement”, communications, emergency-management, wildfire, and public-safety functions one would expect to overlap with the role of an Executive Director of “Engagement and Enterprise Projects” for the SPSA.

So here is the question: where the hell was the public disclosure?

None of this automatically means her past findings were wrong; in fact, some appear to have been borne out by later events. But it does mean those findings can no longer be treated as wholly beyond reasonable concern about independence.

The Auditor’s own office says independence means freedom from bias, conflict of interest, and undue influence - including the perception of bias, conflict of interest and undue influence. It claims its staff must annually confirm compliance with independence standards while threats to independence are to be monitored and reported.

The Provincial Auditor Act may be silent on spousal disclosure, but that silence makes transparency more necessary, not less. When the watchdog audits an agency tied to her own household, the public is owed more than quiet internal assurances — it is owed a clear public account of what was disclosed, what safeguards were imposed, and whether recusal standards existed at all.

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Not a “trust me, Trent.”

The public disclosure.

When was the relationship formally declared within the Auditor’s office?

Was it disclosed to the Public Accounts Committee to which she reports? If so, why was it done in-camera, because there is no record at all of any declaration on the official record, Saskatchewan Hansard.

Was it disclosed each time the Provincial Auditor audited SPSA?

Was Tara Clemett screened off from auditing any SPSA-related planning, supervision, sign-off, or reporting?

Was an acting or alternate structure considered?

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If those safeguards exist, disclose them. Right fucking now.

Because this is not a minor etiquette question.

This is the whole ballgame for a legislative auditor.

Refer a friend

Clemett is a CPA, as are all provincial auditors. Chartered Professional Accountants Saskatchewan’s conduct rules require independence “not only in fact but in appearance”, judged through the eyes of a “reasonable observer… a hypothetical individual who has knowledge of the facts.”

Well guess what?

No reasonable observer would shrug off the fact that a top legislative auditor is repeatedly auditing a government agency, where her husband is a senior director earning six-figures a year, on wildfire preparedness, emergency alerting, dispatching, emergency planning… the lack of all of which undeniably contributed to the handling of the worst Saskatchewan wildfire response in years.

Plus a sketchy multi-million dollar aircraft procurement.

A reasonable observer would ask the obvious question: who thought this did not require a public explanation?

What Tara Clemett is auditing could reveal potential elements, or at least components that should be turned over to law enforcement, if they can not be explained within the bounds of her office.

To be legally and morally precise: none of this, on its own, proves corruption or a compromised result.

That is not the claim.

What I’m asking you to consider is narrower and, in some ways, more devastating: this is an obvious conflict problem, and Saskatchewan’s institutions appear to have treated it as something you did not need to be told about.

That is absurd.

If the public discovered this only after years of SPSA-related audit work, that is not evidence of careful conflict management. It is evidence of a toxic public service culture that is far too comfortable with saying nothing and hoping nobody asks the right question.

And that brings us back to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

PAC reviews the Auditor’s reports, examines the office’s estimates, and recommends the appointment of the Provincial Auditor.

Its chair, Saskatchewan NDP Opposition MLA Trent Wotherspoon, publicly introduced Tara Clemett and her husband in 2021. If he knew enough to welcome the couple in the Legislature, he knew enough now to demand a public explanation of what safeguards were used as her office repeatedly audited his agency.

He did not. He too must provide answers. He wanted the job of PAC chair.

I’m pretty sure I’m now figuring out why the Sask Party let him have it.

This is where Saskatchewan needs to grow up.

Conflicts do not become acceptable because Trent Wotherspoon is terrified of being disliked by the Sask Party (yes, seriously - y’all know exactly what I’m talking about).

Conflicts do not vanish because the people involved are respected professionals.

Conflicts do not become harmless because everyone in the room agrees to say they’re not.

The answer to an apparent conflict at the top of the watchdog system is not embarrassment. It is disclosure.

The answer is not hand-waving. It is recusal standards.

The answer is not silence. It is a rule, stated plainly and applied publicly.

If the Provincial Auditor has a close family relationship with senior leadership at an audited agency, that relationship must be publicly disclosed, and any recusal, segregation of duties, or alternate oversight mechanism must be documented and explained.

That should be the minimum standard in Saskatchewan.

Not after media pressure. Not after opposition outrage. Not after the public pieces it together from directories, Hansard, and audit chapters.

At the beginning.

Because if the public has to reverse-engineer the conflict after the fact, then the system has already failed.

You already know how I feel about that.

This morning, June 23, 2026, the Provincial Auditor will hold a media event releasing her Volume 1 report for 2026.

I am putting this information out in hopes a Saskatchewan reporter hears about this and uses the opportunity this morning to ask the Auditor about this awkward but critical detail regarding roles and agencies that are owned by the Saskatchewan people.

I have emailed both the Provincial Auditor and Trent Wotherspoon about this matter.

I will publish both my emails and their replies, in full, if and when I receive them.

Let me tell you something, though… every single time I think Saskatchewan has hit rock bottom, someone hands me a new and improved shovel.

Where is rock bottom, Saskatchewan?

What if there isn’t one?

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It wasn’t paywalled. It’s dedicated every Saskatchewan resident who has not felt seen, heard or cared-for during one of the worst times in their lives.

Yes, that means 2025 wildfire victims.

But it also means the victims of all the Saskatchewan government’s policies which, like I said in the piece above, the Sask Party knows for a fact comes with a body count.

And Scott Moe doesn’t give a single fuck about any of it or any of you.

I have to assume that’s because killing someone without consequences one time makes it a hell of a lot easier to do hundreds of more times.

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Anyway, I wanted to give you the news before anyone else: last night VP of SPSA operations, Steve Roberts, resigned. He was not escorted off the property, instead he was given the privilege of an exit date of June 30th.

Is this accountability? Responsibility?

After being publicly humiliated into doing it, no, it is not. Now it’s the walk of shame Steve deserves.

But it’s also not enough.

Marlo, you’re up buddy.

I’ve heard more than enough from people who’ve tried to work with Marlo, who are working with Marlo, or refuse to work with Marlo, that Marlo is out of his depth and it’s time to go.

So fucking go, dude. Seriously.

Nobody wants Marlo Pritchard in this job anymore except Scott Moe, because Pritchard’s a stooge.

Time for Marlo to put on his big boi boxers, which means he owns his failures like a man and goes back to doing what he knows how to do.

Oh, and let’s replace either or both of these fucking clowns with Trevor Sewap, shall we? Cause he could probably do the job better than the two combined.

We do run the place, Saskatchewan. Maybe we should quit running it straight into the ground. Good god.

Have a great weekend,

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It is a documentation of facts; a stone cold reckoning with what happens when a government treats public safety, public health, and people’s lives as problems to be managed with a sound byte rather than solved in any meaningful way.

On June 12, 2026, the Saskatchewan government released a report it had been sitting on for three weeks. It was buried via release on a Friday afternoon.

That is not a coincidence.

The MNP LLP Independent Review of the 2025 Wildfire Season was commissioned by the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency (SPSA) to, essentially, review itself.

However, even without the critical eye of an independent forensic audit, the report is a documentation of one of the most thorough institutional failures in the province’s modern history.

Its findings were not ambiguous. They were not hedged.

They are damning in a clear, documented, specific way.

The 2025 wildfire season by the numbers:

• 514 wildfires.

• 2.9 million hectares burned — three times the ten-year provincial average of 898,000 hectares.

• More than 10,000 people evacuated from over 50 communities.

• Canada’s 2nd-worst wildfire season on record.

• Denare Beach: a community of 700 people, approximately 230 homes destroyed.

One year later, 11 homes have been rebuilt.

MNP’s report revealed the province’s fuel mitigation target - 2,464 hectares by 2028, tied to Brad Wall’s useless 2017 Prairie Resilience Strategy - had no scientific basis.

“Fuel mitigation” is the work done before a wildfire ever starts: controlled burns, clearing brush (aka “fuel”), creating firebreaks, and reducing the volume of dead and combustible material around communities so that when a wildfire approaches, it slows, drops in intensity, and gives firefighters a fighting chance to stop it.

Done properly, fuel mitigation is the single most effective tool in a wildfire management program. It is what determines whether a community survives the fire season or doesn’t.

No one at SPSA, not even the Minister, could explain how the 2,464 hectare number was chosen or where it was supposed to have impact. The mitigation team responsible for implementing this target consists of four people and MNP found that their progress “does not appear to be grounded in an assessment of accumulated wildfire risk or fire science.”

Surprise!

In Saskatchewan, “progress” is grounded in nothing more than an assessment of which wealthy Sask Party-sucking ghouls are going to make money off this particular round of human suffering.

The Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency is a Treasury Board Crown corporation created in 2017. It was formed by gradually absorbing functions from Government Relations and other ministries.

First it was the Emergency 911 system, then the Fire Commissioner’s office was folded in.

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In November 2019, wildfire management was transferred to SPSA from the Ministry of Environment. In late 2022 and early 2023 the agency began administering the Provincial Disaster Assistance Program (PDAP).

The pitch from Scooter Moe was a “one-stop shop” for prevention, response, mitigation, and recovery. A unified agency that would break down silos and streamline public safety.

None of it ever happened.

The MNP report found that "the establishment of the SPSA as a joint emergency management and wildfire operations agency does not appear to have been supported by an effective rollout or implementation framework."

Holy shit.

Really, Saskatchewan?

Six-plus years in, according to the report, SPSA had “unclear and overlapping mandates across multiple pieces of legislation, and siloed operations persisted."

Put simply, Saskatchewan’s Public Safety Association is a collection of inherited governance functions glued together by a Kindergarten kid and an Elmer’s stick.

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These were not failures caused by the 2025 season.

The report is explicit: there were pre-existing clear and present SPSA dangers that the 2025 wildfire season simply exposed.

SPSA President & Fire Commissioner Marlo Pritchard is a career police officer.

He is not a wildfire or emergency management professional and never has been.

He spent 35 years in policing, rising through the Regina Police Service before becoming Chief of the Weyburn Police Service for seven years. Beyond his tenure in UN peacekeeping in post-war Kosovo, his background is small-city law enforcement in southeast Saskatchewan.

This is not an insult. It is a description.

Pritchard may be an excellent police administrator. The problem is that he was hired to run an agency whose core mandate is wildfire suppression, emergency management, and disaster recovery — domains that require deep operational expertise he did not have and clearly still does not.

The question is not about Pritchard; the question is why a provincial government thought a police chief was the right person to run the agency charged with managing Saskatchewan’s wildfires, and what that choice reveals about how seriously the government takes public safety.

For example, when Pritchard was asked whether Denare Beach had received any mitigation work before the fire:

“We were engaged with the Denare Beach, but I would have to get more information.” - Marlo Pritchard to reporters, December 2, 2025

He would have to get more information about whether his agency had done mitigation work on a community that had already burned to the ground?!

Pritchard’s public posture during the 2025 fire season was all swagger. He appeared regularly at press conferences alongside Premier Moe and Minister Tim McLeod, striking a “we did everything we could” tone with a shrug, as Saskatchewan people’s homes and villages burned to the ground.

Refer a friend

In a Public Accountability Committee hearing six months before the 2025 fire season, Pritchard testified about SPSA’s emergency preparedness progress.

Sitting in the bowels of the Legislature, in a room full of MLAs from both parties, Pritchard detailed regular meetings at the Provincial Emergency Operations Centre, with a target to complete emergency plan reviews by end of 2025 or early 2026.

“…we have done a lot of work in regards to Saskatchewan emergency preparedness and the provincial emergency management plan… a lot of work around the hazard, risk, vulnerability assessment across the province… critical infrastructure individuals that are professionals or subject matter experts. We’ve identified the highest risks for Saskatchewan. We continue to work with our municipal partners in regards to preparations around emergency management and doing tabletop exercises..." - SPSA President Marlo Pritchard, January 21, 2025

This testimony is now directly relevant: the MNP report found no documentation that any wildfire-specific tabletop exercises occurred before the 2025 season. SPSA leadership provided zero documentation to support that claim that they had. No scenarios. No participant lists. No after-action reports.

Steve Roberts holds the “R.P.F.” designation (Registered Professional Forester) which means he supposedly has the technical credentials for the wildfire side of the portfolio. He has worked in some capacity with forest fires for the Government of Saskatchewan for over 25 years.

This is the most operationally credible face of SPSA from a forestry and wildfire background:

Could it check out any more?

Yet in August 2025, as fires were still active, Roberts told SaskNOW that if he had to grade the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency’s wildfire response that year, he’d call it “nothing short of excellent.”

Roberts cited no fatalities, communities protected and successful mutual aid relationships with Nevada and California as the backbone of his stunning success. He acknowledged Denare Beach losses but framed the overall response as “extraordinary.”

What a grotesque thing to say. A self-preserving clown.

When the Wolf Fire was bearing down on Denare Beach, Saskatchewan forest fire management expert Trevor Sewap was fire base supervisor for Pelican Narrows.

A wildland firefighter for over 36 years, Sewap offered to send helicopters to intercept the Wolf Fire.

SPSA supervisors declined.

Sewap proposed burning off islands around the village to create firebreaks.

Declined.

Sewap escalated.

He was ignored.

“No one listened to me, or anyone else with experience. The guys that run the office are young guys and because they’re sitting in office in a higher seat than me, they just don’t want to listen.” — Former SPSA fire base supervisor Trevor Sewap, speaking at the Saskatchewan Legislature, December 2, 2025

Sewap quit mid-crisis. He lost his own home to the fires.

I really have tried to put myself in his shoes and I can’t. Imagine feeling that kind of betrayal on so many levels?

Sewap drove to Regina before Christmas and stood in the legislature to say what should never have needed saying: the agency charged with protecting Saskatchewan wilfully ignored the people who knew how to protect Saskatchewan.

Kari Lentowicz, a Denare Beach resident with 20 years of wildfire response training and a member of Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation, echoed every word. She, other community members, and retired SPSA staff all called for the Pelican Narrows base to take mitigation action in the days before the fire.

“It is critical that people look to the local knowledge, the use of experience that’s there. Listen to the people that have the knowledge, not the people who are just dipping their toes in.” — Kari Lentowicz, Saskatchewan Legislature, December 2, 2025

Ignored.

Saskatchewan had no recovery strategy when the 2025 season hit. An agency created specifically to manage provincial emergencies had no plan for what comes after the emergency.

Wildfire recovery was, in MNP’s own words, “ad hoc and inconsistent.”

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And then there is Peter Boniface — the SPSA’s Executive Director of Air Operations. Boniface was, before joining SPSA, the Director of Maintenance at Conair Group Inc.

In 2024, SPSA sole-sourced a $187 million contract to Conair — Boniface’s former employer — for four water bombers. The procurement document was designed around technical specifications that matched Conair’s Q400 aircraft perfectly. Coulson Aircrane — the only other major global provider — has filed a court application alleging the process was rigged and that the Sask Party government overpaid by approximately $100 million.

Boniface remains in his role. The provincial auditor, Tara Clemett, has announced her office is investigating both the $187 million procurement and SPSA’s wildfire preparedness. Results are not yet public.

The pattern at SPSA — a police chief at the top, a self-grading VP, a former industry insider who sole-sourced a $187 million contract to his former employer — is not accidental. It is the organizational expression of a political party that treats public safety as a pesky management problem rather than a life-and-death responsibility.

And it’s not new.

The pattern was established — definitively, catastrophically, and on national television — in the fall of 2021.

It is at least one direct predecessor to every failure that followed, because it demonstrated that Scott Moe and the Sask Party could laugh in the face of experts, watch their own voters’ deaths accumulate, face no serious political consequences, and then do it all over again.

July 11, 2021

Saskatchewan becomes the first province in Canada to completely lift all COVID-19 restrictions — despite having among the lowest vaccination rates in the country. Premier Moe’s framing is celebratory. Then he completely stopped COVID-19 briefings for 48 consecutive days.

September 28, 2021

Dr. Saqib Shahab, the Chief Medical Health Officer of Saskatchewan, tells the public:

“We will likely not have Christmas and New Year at this rate. It will be a fall and winter of misery at the current rate.”

Health Minister Paul Merriman’s response?

“The health-care system is still intact.”

Apparently Paul had confused our healthcare system with a golden retriever he wanted to stud.

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October 7, 2021

By this point, Saskatchewan’s COVID death rate is 4.5 times higher than the rest of Canada. September had been the province’s third-deadliest pandemic month with 88 deaths.

Moe calls a press conference.

In it he announces, almost two years after the pandemic started, something called the Provincial Emergency Operations Centre (PEOC). He details SPSA’s Marlo Pritchard will co-lead the pandemic response, alongside SHA CEO Scott Livingstone and Deputy Minister of Health Max Hendricks.

Moe’s official justification for removing responsibility for a public health crisis response from Saskatchewan’s public health agency was “better coordination… getting resources to the right place at the right time.”

He also bleated, “Responsibility for public health recommendations and orders will continue to be managed by the Chief Medical Health Officer, Dr. Shahab.”

October 13, 2021

Saskatchewan began airlifting its own residents out of the province; its health system had collapsed.

October 20, 2021

Dr. Shahab weeps in front of news cameras.

October 22, 2021

Canadian Armed Forces medical personnel are deployed to Saskatchewan.

It was during the mass death in October 2021 than an Angus Reid survey found Moe’s approval rating on COVID response had collapsed from 61 percent to 43 percent: a 18-point freefall.

There were no firings.

Merriman kept his job.

Moe’s ratings went back up.

Even after killing people - or at least wilfully promoting preventable death - the Sask Party government survived, in part because Saskatchewan moved on, and in part because the next crisis was already on its way.

Let’s call this horseshit what it actually is: a Liability Distribution Exercise. By creating a multi-organizational command structure, Moe ensured that accountability would be diffused and deniable… a Scott Moe special.

What the COVID fourth wave taught Scott Moe and the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency is that this government can ignore expert warnings, watch preventable deaths accumulate at historically catastrophic rates, face no serious political consequences, and proceed to the next crisis unchanged.

This is a Sask Party PR strategy to which we’ve become completely numb; it’s exactly what they’re trying to do right now with wildfires.

The government received the MNP report on May 22, 2026.

It held it for three weeks.

This video from the Saskatchewan NDP’s Facebook page is wild.

Watch Moe’s bored face at the 15-second mark as it morphs from “IDGAF” to “Regina George” - because how dare you?

So sophisticated.

So Saskatchewan.

Minister Michael Weger’s response: SPSA “must do better.”

He called the 2025 season “unprecedented” — a boldfaced lie and the precise framing the MNP review explicitly rejected, finding conditions were “extreme, but reasonably foreseeable after consecutive years of extreme Canadian wildfire seasons.”

I often wonder why MNP allows itself to be used like this. Why they’d allow that kind of lie in a news conference on a report they were paid for by the people of Saskatchewan, not the Sask Party.

And Marlo Pritchard:

“The ultimate responsibility is myself as president. I have committed to my board and my minister that we can do better. We now have a roadmap to follow.”

Pritchard was not the architect of the dysfunction the MNP review found. He inherited an agency that was already structurally flawed.

But he’s ran it now for six years.

There is no version of Western first-world governance in which the person who presided over a documented, systemic, multi-year organizational failure, one that contributed directly to the total annihilation of at least one Saskatchewan community and wreaked havoc on hundreds of others, faces zero professional consequences.

Pritchard did not resign.

He was not fired.

Today, even after this report, he is still the President of the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency, earning over a quarter million public dollars per year.

The Sask Party Minister backed him.

Scott Moe’s cool with it, because there is nothing Scooter loves more than to help a White mediocre Saskatchewan male fail upwards, just like he has for his entire life.

The significance of the MNP report extends beyond the operational findings, because it reveals the Sask Party’s framing of 2025’s wildfires before, during, and after the report’s release as wildly, in the very least, inaccurate.

An unprecedented event. A heroic response by front-line workers. Lessons to be learned. Commitments to do better. A roadmap. An implementation unit. An emasculated middle-aged Minister who, if he could scrape together what’s left of his testosterone would be so fucking concerned, you guys.

This was not a once-in-a-generation event that overwhelmed a functioning Sask Party system. It was a foreseeable pressure that exposed a system that had never been properly built by the Sask Party.

That distinction matters enormously.

If it was unprecedented, no one is responsible. If it was foreseeable, the people who failed to prepare are responsible.

The MNP review says it was foreseeable.

Responsibility without consequence is not responsibility. It is the pantomime of responsibility designed to prevent actual accountability. Today this is a Sask Party-patented public relations trick, even without their State Radio mouthpiece reassuring everybody it’s totally fine.

If accepting responsibility carried professional cost then the word “responsibility” would mean something.

It does not mean anything in Saskatchewan in 2026.

It is a lie delivered to a camera before returning to the office, always after the same story. The same people in the same jobs, the same structural failures unaddressed, and the next crisis already forming.

This is not a streak of bad luck.

These are not mistakes born of ignorance. Every one of them was made with warnings, in writing, from credentialed experts, delivered directly to the decision-makers.

Every time, the predicted consequences arrived.

Every time, the accountability has not.

The argument that accountability requires some kind of legal finding of criminal negligence before we can speak about what happened plainly is a form of political protection for the powerful, elected or otherwise. This form of silencing has been beaten into the heads of Saskatchewan people, who must break free from their fear and get busy getting heard.

Like right fucking now. This isn’t normal.

In ordinary life, when someone ignores repeated documented warnings and people die predictably as a result, we call that manslaughter. In Saskatchewan politics, we call it a challenging situation and commission a review by external auditors and lawyers who donate a ton of cash to the Sask Party - to keep lazy, expensive contracts like this rolling into their office.

At what point does a pattern of ignoring documented warnings and watching people die become something more than negligence?

At what point did Saskatchewan accept that it is now a place where “certain” lives: northern, Indigenous, addicted, — are totally acceptable losses in service of the Sask Party’s political fortunes?

Is this what Bob, June, Billy, Ken, Rod and Dan had in mind when they announced their new party on that hot August day in Regina?

That it would one day their new Saskatchewan Party would symbolize the wilful, negligent death of Saskatchewan?

Well done, friends.

Let’s close with what real accountability would have once looked like in Saskatchewan, before a bunch of fucking children swarmed the Legislature.

Marlo Pritchard would not be the President of the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency. Steve Roberts would no longer have a job.

MNP found systemic dysfunction on his watch: no documented exercises, a PEOC that didn’t function as designed, an agency that couldn’t coordinate with itself, and a culture in which frontline expertise was overruled by office management.

That is an unequivocal leadership failure.

In any private company, in any military organization, in any government serious about its obligations — it is a termination.

Staying in that role is gutless and shameful..

The $187 million Conair water bomber contract would be subject to a full forensic audit and the results made public before one more red cent is spent by SPSA. Staffers under investigation would likely also be on leave, paid or otherwise.

Because if the auditor’s investigation finds what the court affidavit alleges in the Conair matter, the responsible officials would be identified and the matter referred to the appropriate law enforcement authorities.

Scott Moe knows this.

His Cabinet and caucus knows this, and continues to proceed making choices with a fucking body count attached.

We must have a forensic investigation into the 2025 wildfire season, the water bomber procurement, and the SPSA’s structural failures. The MNP review was competent, as far as it went. It was also explicitly not a blame exercise and not independent in the fullest sense.

An inquest with subpoena power and independent counsel is different. The government rejected this call from the NDP Opposition. It should be forced to explain why, in detail, in a Legislature chamber.

And if none of that happens, if Pritchard keeps his job, if the supervised consumption site stays closed, if the inquiry is blocked, if the roadmap becomes a shelf document like every roadmap before it… then those decision makers need to be removed from office by the people of Saskatchewan.

There is a word for what happens when someone, through deliberate inaction, ignores urgent and repeated warnings, strips away the infrastructure that keeps people alive, and then watches people die.

That word is not “unprecedented circumstances.” It is not “coordination challenges.” It is not a talking point about personal responsibility or recovery-oriented systems of care.

The word is negligence.

And in Saskatchewan, under nearly two decades of Saskatchewan Party government culminating in the tenure of Premier Scott Moe, negligence has reached its peak, entrenched as full-scale government philosophy.

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The Sask Party treats warnings as noise and accountability as theatre. The only question that matters anymore is how long the people of Saskatchewan will allow this kind of abuse to continue.

Enjoy your week.

PS: I know local media dutifully reported the “11 recommendations” made in the MNP report and Scott Moe promising and crossing his heart to follow them. I don’t care what MNP “recommends,” at all. We already know there isn’t enough capacity in the SPSA, if not the entire Government of Saskatchewan, to implement a 2-car parade, nevermind 11.

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Before I continue I want to be clear up front: I’m not knocking the reporter. I assume he’s just doing what he’s told.

The work he did costs money, even if not his own. It takes time - that we’re paying him for with public dollars. Corporate registry searches alone aren’t free, which is why we fund a public broadcaster, including a budget for precisely this kind of work.

I don’t receive public funding. When I require these documents for my own writing I pay for them myself, which is one of the reasons there’s a fundraising link in everything I publish.

However again, this is supposedly precisely why the CBC exists — so that journalism that is expensive to produce but essential to Canadian democracy gets done.

So let’s talk about the story that got written by the CBC versus the story that needed to be written.

“Web of companies” would suggest that the CBC went down the expensive rabbit hole of chasing the real ownership of a numbered company that donated to the Sask Party. Cool.

Sometimes, for example, a numbered company will use a law firm as their proxy address, while its shareholders are just more numbered companies.

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That means you have to spend more money, continuing to pull corporate documents for ten to twenty dollars each until you reach the bottom of the pyramid, or “web”, and find actual the actual names of the people who own everything you just dug through.

Here’s what that looks like :

And yeah, it was Part 7.

You can find the rest of what I’ve written on donors on this site simply by searching “Sask Party donors” on my home page (or I’ve posted a bunch of links at the bottom of this piece).

I’m not saying it’s not a lot of money or work.

It is, definitely.

What I am saying that spending and work is the J-O-B of the C-B-C.

Now, a numbered company is not inherently sinister. It’s just a corporation registered with a number instead of a business name — a common, legal, entirely mundane business structure used for everything from holding rental properties to managing family trusts.

Nothing nefarious about them on their own.

The problem isn’t the vehicle.

In fact, no jurisdiction in Canada explicitly singles out numbered corporations as unable to make political donations.

Why?

Because almost every jurisdiction in Canada has already banned corporate donations

The real problem in Saskatchewan and in the CBC story is structural — if you allow unlimited corporate donations, numbered companies are the natural tool for obscuring who's actually giving. Saskatchewan's lack of any corporate ban means the numbered company problem is essentially baked in.

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The even bigger real problem in Saskatchewan is nobody gives a flying fuck about any of this.

Then the CBC runs one story - in conjunction with the Investigative Journalism Foundation, of all places - that leaves us with not much more than “Oh well, I guess we’ll never know.”

🤷🏻‍♀️

“Several of the biggest donations made to Saskatchewan political parties in 2025 came from companies for which there is virtually no public information available.” - CBC.ca, June 9, 2026, ‘Web of companies masks identity of big political donors in Saskatchewan’

I’m sorry CBC, but that’s just not accurate.

There’s nothing in the Sask Party’s 2025 fiscal return that is remotely difficult to figure out. In fact, here’s the list of the top twenty corporate donors from the Saskatchewan Party’s 2025 fiscal return:

1. Brandt Tractor Ltd. $10,000.00

2. Agincourt Investments (Rawlinson) $9,800.00

3. Tropical Way Properties Ltd (Rawlinson) $9,200.00

4. Airwaves Radio Ltd (Rawlinson) $8,800.00

5. 565509 Saskatchewan Ltd (Rawlinson) $8,300.00

6. JILLTD Investments Ltd. (Rawlinson) $7,700.00

7. Longhorn Oil & Gas Ltd $7,500.00

8. Millennium III Capital Corp $7,000.00

9. Rawlco Radio Ltd. (Rawlinson) $4,800.00

10. Rawlco Capital Ltd. (Rawlinson) $4,400.00

11. Robertson Prairie Acres Inc $4,500.00

12. Kelly Panteluk Construction Ltd $4,338.82

13. Pow City Mechanical $4,157.86

14. Babco Meats Ltd. $4,000.00

15. Canadian Energy Metals Corp $3,368.40

16. Bayshore HealthCare $3,250.00

17. SST Trucking $5,500.00

18. Clearpoint Health Network $5,000.00

19. HCI Ventures Ltd. $5,000.00

20. Mancal Corporation $5,000.00

Not complicated, my friends.

You can use Google and figure exactly who these people are and what’s going on here. For example:

“A joint investigation by the IJF and CBC found many of these companies share directors, shareholders and even physical addresses, revealing a system of personal and corporate accounts used to mask influence.” - CBC.ca, June 9, 2026, ‘Web of companies masks identity of big political donors in Saskatchewan’

What the fucking fuck are they talking about?

Refer a friend

The only reason the “system” is able to “mask influence” is because Saskatchewan newsrooms don’t do a damn thing to unmask it.

As discussed in the piece I just published on this, the Saskatchewan NDP have shut up about it completely, because in 2024 those same corporations told the NDP to shut up and take their money if they ever want a chance at forming government again.

As for State Radio propping up the Saskatchewan Party’s horseshit government - which part of that is news?

CBC found in their story that members of the Rawlinson family — owners of Rawlco Radio, which operates six stations in Saskatoon and Regina — funnelled more than $460,000 to the Saskatchewan Party over ten years through seven separate corporate entities. Those included shell companies, numbered companies, and companies with no websites, no storefronts, or public presence of any kind.

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The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives researcher quoted in the piece called the pattern “very puzzling.”

Democracy Watch called it something that “smells really badly.”

Holy shit, where’s Scooby Doo when you need him?

If this is what investigative journalism looks like in Saskatchewan in 2026, we’re so screwed it’s not even funny.

I’ve been doing this work for years.

Yes, writing these pieces is expensive and time-consuming. Pulling registered shareholder data, cross-referencing corporate registries across three provinces, mapping the connections — yes, it’s a grind.

But the CBC found the answer.

And then treated the answer like a mystery.

The answer is not a mystery.

It’s basically a rebate program, for god’s sake.

Rawlco Radio is what I’ve called for years Saskatchewan’s “State Radio” — a private broadcaster whose political alignment with the Saskatchewan Party has been so consistent, so durable, so public and so operationally useful to the governing party that the relationship stopped resembling editorial independence a long time ago.

A media company that gives $460,000 to a political party through a maze of shell companies isn’t hiding how much it cares about the party.

It’s hiding how much it needs the Sask Party to give it your tax dollars to keep operating.

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And yeah, this was publicly and openly discussed when I worked there, so I’m coming at this from more than one perspective.

So how much does the Saskatchewan government spend on advertising with Rawlco Radio, and through which agency does that money flow?

The answer, apparently, is Nunya, even if it is your money being spent.

Saskatchewan has no Government Advertising Act, which would require annual disclosure of what money is being spent with each specific media company.

Let that sit for a moment. Ontario has had one since 2004. The federal government has an incredibly stringent set of rules. So does the province of British Columbia, including public reporting on government ad campaigns. Most provinces have some statutory framework requiring disclosure of what public money goes to which media outlet, and prohibiting the use of public funds for partisan advertising.

Today, everything the Government of Saskatchewan pumps out is partisan advertising, because the Saskatchewan Party believes it’s now the province’s “Natural Governing Party”. It owns the province, so it can’t be partisan anymore.

Seriously, don’t tell me you don’t know this.

Saskatchewan has nothing. No rules. No annual reporting on advertising spending. No outlet-by-outlet disclosure. The Saskatchewan Party routes its government advertising purchases through ad agencies — which means the actual destination of your tax dollars never has to appear in any public document.

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This is not a web. It is a loop. And it is legal because the Saskatchewan Party has ensured it remains legal and Saskatchewan media refuses to talk about it because without Sask Party ad dollars, a bunch of them wouldn’t have jobs.

A broadcaster that depends on government advertising revenue in a province of just over one million people, on a radio platform that has been in structural decline for twenty years, does not pump nearly half a million dollars into a political party out of partisan, civic-minded enthusiasm.

It does so because that party’s government spending — on agriculture campaigns, resource promotion, affordability messaging, and whatever other publicly funded communications fluff Scooter decides he needs — is the difference between staying on air and going dark.

The donation isn’t influence-buying in the traditional sense. It’s closer to a protection payment dressed up as democracy.

The CBC’s headline called this a “web,” then sort of explained the process of untangling it.

CBC Saskatchewan readers deserved the story underneath the process: a private broadcaster is donating to the party that keeps the broadcaster and its uber-wealthy owners financially alive, through shell companies designed to obscure how much money is moving and from whom, in a province with no laws requiring the government to disclose what it spends on advertising or with whom.

That’s not a web. That’s a transaction.

The CBC found it and then asked why it was complicated.

Why is reporting on political party’s fiscal returns seemingly not part of the CBC’s Saskatchewan annual editorial schedule?

Why aren’t reporters pulling the Elections Saskatchewan donor rolls every single year, cross-referencing money spent with the government’s advertising agencies and mapping the financial relationships between the province’s media outlets, its ad agencies, and the governing party?

This is not niche investigative work.

It is basic democratic accountability journalism.

It is why our public broadcaster supposedly exists.

Saskatchewan’s election finance laws are among the most permissive in Canada. The province is one of only three jurisdictions in the country with no donation cap, no ban on corporate donations, and no prohibition on out-of-province money.

Prior to the 2024 election, before they lost all semblance of their own dignity, the Saskatchewan NDP introduced a bill in 2024 to fix this. It went nowhere and they will never raise it again.

The Saskatchewan Party, whose donors benefit most from the current system, reviewed the laws after the election, as required. The reviews have so far produced nothing.

The companies aren’t the web.

The laws are the web.

The CBC found the silk thread.

How about they pull it next time? Wouldn’t that be novel.

If you’re bored, in addition to what I posted above, here’s links to the rest of everything I’ve ever written about Saskatchewan’s pathetic campaign finance laws. No paywalls. Like always, I named names. I also received at least one cease and desist lol.

Fuck these clowns, all the way back to the travelling hillbilly circus they came from.

And Saskatchewan, what the hell are you people doing about the third-world democracy you live in, besides nothing? Are you literally as helpless as some poor soul elsewhere in the world, who’s living under a full-blown dictatorship?

Full-blown communism?

Cause that’s exactly how conservative Saskatchewan is behaving.

Have a great weekend.

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The first $10,000 retainer came together faster than I expected, from people I didn’t know were paying attention or even cared if I continued to to do this or not.

Clearly you do.

I haven’t forgotten that. I won’t and I’m still so grateful today. Thank you.

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My first lawyer was an old school Merchant lawyer; he looked at the suit and called it what it was. He defended it on Charter grounds. Standard stuff for a case so weak.

In September we went to mandatory mediation. I’m not going to say much about it, except that there was a moment — just a moment — where I simply said my name, looked across the table, and watched a grown man’s face become the colour of a stop sign.

I’ve thought about that a lot since.

After mediation, Kevin Doherty filed a second action because I wrote about it. Contempt of court. He wanted the posts down, $5,000 in his pocket, and if I didn’t comply — jail.

OurSask Lives Because of Your Support

His argument was that I’d violated mediation confidentiality. The problem with that argument is that Saskatchewan’s statute governs what can be used as evidence in future proceedings. It is an evidentiary rule. It is not a publication ban. It is not a gag order. There is no precedent for what he attempted.

Because it was never about what I wrote. It was about jacking up my costs to get me to stop.

Lol. Clearly he’d never met me.

I made a decision. I fired my lawyer.

I refused to spend $25,000 defending an unprecedented contempt claim to protect content that as far as I’m concerned, violated no law. I decided to let it go to default judgment. I moved out of Saskatchewan, again, because it’s not a safe place for people like me, who refuse to capitulate to people like this. It won’t be until this provincial government is gone.

Then Substack got involved.

Their legal team reviewed Doherty’s claim, my defence and most importantly, my work on their platform.

They reached the same conclusion my lawyers had.

I was able to hire a new lawyer, who is amazing, and Substack is now funding my defence.

The trust account has a nice balance we haven’t needed to touch. There’s more where it came from, until this matter is resolved.

I imagine this news took the wind out of the sails of those who were counting on the financial threat of defending multiple lawsuits being enough to shut me down.

My lawyers appeared for me at the contempt hearing in December, just before Christmas. It is now June. Because the Saskatchewan Party’s justice system is as awesome as its healthcare system, no judgment has yet been issued.

I haven’t heard from Kevin Doherty since.

For a while I wrote pieces responding directly to the claims against me.

Detailed, sourced, careful.

If you’ve read them, you understand why I eventually stopped:

I stopped because it felt like an absolute waste of time and energy.

On the legal side, we can do this as long as lobbyist extraordinaire Kevin Doherty feels he needs to.

Sorry, “political leader” Kevin Doherty.

A “distinguished political leader”, even.

Good to know.

That’s from Kev’s profile as a director of Saskatchewan’s shiny new mega-mining project.

You know the one. It’s gonna be huge. It’s currently capitalized through private investment, but presumably the plan is to hit the TSX.

Can’t wait.

They should be thrilled that Kevin Doherty put their project on my permanent radar.

Because even though I’ve refused to write about his lawsuit over the past year, I’ve never stopped doing what I do. Thanks to that legwork, and through sources who’ve been paying attention longer than I have, I’ve accumulated far more material on issues I’d never have known about.

Quite a bit, actually.

I’m not publishing it right now.

If that reads as a concession, it isn’t.

There is no version of events in which everything stays buried. None. The only question is timing, and that is entirely under my control.

I’m in no rush.

So what’s the latest on me and Kevin Doherty?

Absolutely nothing.

Yet.

And I’m still right here.

Talk soon,

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Anyone with even the most basic understanding of Saskatchewan politics knows what the real problem is: money.

More specifically, who controls it.

Because the people who control the money control the power.

If you’re a Sask Party politician, you already know the family business.

Every year, headquarters pulls in a few million dollars, then “revenue-shares” part of that money out to each of its 61 constituency associations. When election time rolls around, those constituency associations use the money to run campaigns. Then Elections Saskatchewan partially reimburses those campaign expenses, and the cash gets kicked back up the chain.

It’s quite the cycle when you actually look at it on paper. Which I did.

We’ll come back to it.

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Under The Election Act, 1996, Saskatchewan runs a publicly financed rebate program that was supposedly designed to make running for office accessible regardless of personal wealth.

Yes, you’re allowed to laugh.

Both registered political parties and individual candidates can qualify for the rebate, but only if they clear a minimum threshold - at least 15 percent of votes cast province-wide for the party to be eligible, and individual candidates must also receive at least 15 percent of the vote in their own constituency.

If that threshold is met, an eligible political party can be reimbursed with public money (your money) for up to 50 percent of its election expenses, while an eligible candidate can recover up to 60 percent of theirs.

Practically, what that means is that in many Saskatchewan ridings — especially in rural Saskatchewan — running an NDP campaign is a money-losing venture almost every single time.

Any surplus campaign funds left over after the rebate must be remitted back to the party or constituency association or, in the case of independent candidates, to the provincial treasury. This prevents the reimbursement program from functioning as a personal windfall.

What the Saskatchewan Party’s own 2024 election year return shows, though, is what happens when that structure hardens into a machine.

In 2024, an election year, the party reported $2.5-mil in individual donations and $1.6-mil in corporate donations, up from $1.8-mil and $485K respectively the year before. Those two streams alone accounted for roughly 90 percent of total revenue in 2024, up from about 62 percent in 2023.

Meanwhile, the smaller, grassroots-looking streams moved in the opposite direction: in 2024 Sask Party memberships plunged to $109K from $150K and the Victory Fund dropped to $27K from $39K .

What I found the most interesting is the fact that their many fundraisers - all those pay-to-play Premier’s Dinners, golf tournaments - don’t even break even.

The Sask Party’s fundraisers lose money.

Are you still laughing? Lol omg these idiots.

The only thing propping up those dinners is the revenue from corporations who “advertise” at them.

Yes, the political party that governs our province has an “advertising” line item in their revenue column and that’s how they make money, in case you didn’t think this was already too fucked up.

The Sask Party’s story is not a story about a broad membership base (people) keeping the party afloat.

It is a story about a party becoming more financially concentrated and more dependent on major donors.

And their dependency does not stop with donors. The same return shows headquarters leaning on constituency associations and the public purse to keep the whole operation moving.

In 2024, the party recorded $1.5-mil in “constituencies – revenue share,” $645K in short-term loans from constituencies, and $440K in accounts payable to constituencies. It also took $500K in election expenditure reimbursement (your money), while year-end receivables included $506K in election reimbursement and $274K in loans to campaigns.

That is the cycle in black and white: money pushed around inside the party, money floated upward from the ridings, and taxpayer-funded reimbursement arriving later to help settle the books. For all the rhetoric about self-reliance and free enterprise, the party’s own numbers describe a political machine running on concentrated private money, internal cash shuffling, and a public subsidy.

In the Saskatchewan Party, constituency association funds are constantly recycled back up to the centre.

And if you’re thinking that this also means your tax dollars are helping keep the Sask Party’s fundraising machine alive, congratulations: you’ve understood the system exactly as it was built.

This is just one of the many, many problems with money and politics that is unique to Saskatchewan. Alberta and British Columbia don’t issue rebates at all. Compared to other provinces that do, Saskatchewan’s publicly-funded program is incredibly generous.

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But the money is only part of the problem. As we’ve established, the Sask Party doesn’t really need your money. Between its legacy fundraisers and wearing down the electorate to dangerous levels of helplessness, it’s had the province on lock for years.

The Sask Party needs their donors to not just want but desperately need a Sask Party government, to facilitate the corruption that makes those donors rich and keeps their party in power.

See, I know it’s not about money because I well know the biggest Sask Party donor to-date. I think it’s safe to say that donor and the Sask Party are not friends anymore.

Why?

Because that donor didn’t need anything from Sask Party.

Unlike most Sask Party donors, this one headquarters their companies in Saskatchewan - meaning they actually pay taxes here. They own wildly-successful North American businesses across multiple industries without an iota of support from the Sask Party.

This person gave the Sask Party a very generous gift and then had the audacity to simply want good things for Saskatchewan people in return. He or she didn’t need anything else from the Sask Party, besides hoping for a bit of accountability.

Well, we all know how the Sask Party feels about accountability. They made sure that donor did too.

You are only valuable to the Sask Party if you have money and need something from them. The Sask Party needs their biggest cash supporters to also require new legislation or changed regulations - political favours. You know exactly who they are, and so do they. They’re not successful, they’re not savvy- they’re a bunch of mediocre, middle-aged corporate welfare bums.

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A permit, an approval, or a look away - that is what the vast majority of Sask Party’s high-level “donors” are specifically purchasing, boldly and in plain sight. And Saskatchewan is one of the only jurisdictions left in the Western world who allows it to happen.

Brad Wall and his wannabe cowboy cronies used to call lawless Saskatchewan “the Wild West”. It made them feel really cool and masculine, no doubt - fulfilled a whole bunch of emasculated fantasies about themselves.

Saskatchewan is not the Wild West.

Far more accurate would be calling it a Failed State.

A third-world country, even, ruled by backwater-authoritarians who use Canada’s apathy to Saskatchewan and corrupted levers of money and economic control to hold on to power.

I’m not a huge Michael Boda fan. I think our Chief Electoral Officer knows damn well how bad democracy is in Saskatchewan and could make a hell of a lot more noise about it. I don’t understand why so many Saskatchewan people can just sit there and allow themselves to be used to helm these disastrously-flawed government agencies.

Then I remember their six-figure salaries to do nothing more than shut their mouths and I kind of get it, I guess.

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To be fair to Boda, he has made some effort to make change.

Late last year he delivered his verdict on the 2024 provincial election process. Buried in 180 pages of technical recommendations is a damning indictment of how the Sask Party treats democratic accountability: with contempt.

Michael Boda’s post-election report reads like a parent explaining - for the third time - why their toddler needs to stop scribbling all over the walls. Except in this case, the toddler controls the Legislative Assembly, and the walls are the foundation of democracy.

For example, even before the 2024 election, Boda recommended using electronic ballot-counting machines.

Those aren’t the same as voting machines.

Voters still mark paper ballots with a pen. The scanners simply count faster and more accurately. Teachers used these scanners thirty years ago in Saskatchewan to mark our standardized tests.

Boda tested scanner machines in three 2023 by-elections. A former Chief Justice of Saskatchewan reviewed the results and confirmed they were 100 percent accurate.

The Legislature’s Board of Internal Economy - controlled by the Sask Party - killed it anyway.

Their reason?

A vague assertion from young Master Jeremy Harrison that “ballots cast by hand should be counted by hand.”

No evidence.

Refer a friend

No experts.

Just Weeman Harrison and a folksy slogan that sounds principled, until you realize it means forcing volunteer election workers to hand-count thousands of ballots after working all day, increasing the risk of human error, and delaying results for candidates and voters.

Even better, rejecting ballot scanners also killed the “Vote Anywhere” option, which would have let Saskatchewan voters cast a ballot at any polling station in their constituency instead of being assigned to one specific location. Obviously, Vote Anywhere only works if you have electronic systems to track who’s voted and tabulate ballots from multiple locations.

But rejecting electronic ballot-counting is just the symptom.

The disease is a government that has systematically ignored calls for basic transparency on literally anything and everything it does.

That is common knowledge by now.

This next one, however, is not so common.

I’ve studied Saskatchewan politics for years. Somehow I missed the fact that there’s a loophole in our election laws big enough to drunk drive a Sask Party Suburban through, which allows political donations disappear from public view entirely.

Here’s how it works:

• you can donate to a political party (reported publicly);

• you can donate to a candidate during an election (reported publicly);

• or, anytime you like, you can donate to a constituency association - and if you don’t ask for a tax receipt, that donation never has to be disclosed anywhere, ever.

It just vanishes into the association’s bank account, then pushed up to headquarters as a donation to the party from the association.

No public record of where the money came from. No transparency. No accountability.

This arguably means that any businessperson, let’s say from India or China, can donate whenever and however much money they want to the Sask Party by funnelling it through a constituency association - and we’d never know.

Yet, the Saskatchewan Party’s own constitution requires every constituency association submit to party HQ a complete list of all donations it received, including the names of donors and amounts, by February 1st of each year. The constitution also asks for audited financial statements from every riding association by April 1st.

In other words, the Saskatchewan Party’s internal rules demand full donor disclosure… to themselves.

But not a syllable flows to Elections Saskatchewan, or towards anything resembling public transparency or accountability.

This isn’t normal or acceptable. There is no excuse for this kind of electoral, political donor corruption in 2026.

With these so-called “rules”, or lack thereof, Saskatchewan is a democratic outlier among Canadian provinces, if not the entire continent of North America. The comparison is so bad that it’s embarrassing.

At the federal level, electoral district associations are required to file annual returns with Elections Canada and publicly disclose all donors over $200.

Alberta requires constituency associations to file annual financial statements with Elections Alberta by March 31 each year. There’s a $4,300 annual contribution cap. Corporations and unions can’t donate; individuals only.

Constituency associations must disclose all contributions to Elections Manitoba within 30 days of year-end, with the names of all donors over $250 made available for public inspection. There’s a $5,000 annual cap. Corporations and unions can’t donate; individuals only.

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Ontario requires annual financial returns to Elections Ontario with donor disclosure. $5000 donation cap, corporations and unions banned and - you guessed it - individual donors only.

Saskatchewan?

No requirement for constituency associations to report their financials to Elections Saskatchewan.

No contribution limits.

Corporations and unions, from anywhere, can donate freely.

No cap on how much a single donor can give.

And if the donor is willing to skip the tax receipt, their money disappears into a black hole.

I’ve written about Saskatchewan’s awful, archaic and corrupt political finance landscape so many times that I feel like a broken record. Like I’m beating my head against a brick wall. Saskatchewan is not just lagging behind, it’s operating a political finance system every other major province recognized as corrupt and shut down years ago.

The NDP’s silence on this issue is equally telling.

To me, it’s more offensive than the Sask Party’s.

In 2024, when the provincial election outcome briefly looked uncertain and corporate Saskatchewan began to nervously contemplate the idea of change in government, the Saskatchewan NDP cashed in. It received over $100,000 from corporations, way more than double previous years and including donations from the Sask Party’s roster of high-powered law firms, developers, and even Rawlco freaking Radio.

Those corporations didn’t write those cheques because they had a sudden, mid-campaign, ideological change of heart and became leftists.

Instead, they were buying insurance to maintain their leverage, regardless of the outcome at the ballot box.

When they accepted the money, the NDP understood the assignment. That’s why, since the 2024 provincial election, they’ve been conspicuously quiet on banning corporate donations or closing any one of the many other transparency gaps in our antiquated election finance laws.

The Saskatchewan NDP will never bring up Saskatchewan’s grotesque political finance swamp again, because they’ve been told by the same people who run the fu*cking swamp - nay, the province - to STFU and take their money.

And keep taking it.

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Speaking up, which we already know the Saskatchewan NDP is terrified to do on an average day, would mean risking those same donors in 2028, when the Saskatchewan NDP figures corporate hedging might be the difference between opposition and power.

Actual human voters? They DGAF.

This means Saskatchewan voters are stuck with a government that actively blocks campaign finance reform and an Opposition that refuses to push for it, both protecting a system that serves Scott Moe and Carla Beck’s interests over democratic accountability to voters.

There’s no other way to frame it.

The Saskatchewan NDP under Carla Beck has morphed into a grotesque, wannabe, yet somehow even more inadequate-version of the Sask Party.

And then there’s the disinformation threat; a problem that should terrify anyone who cares about fair elections.

Boda’s report warns that Saskatchewan is dangerously unprepared for AI-generated deepfakes and election disinformation. He points out that Premier Scott Moe’s voice and likeness were hijacked twice in 2025 for AI-generated cryptocurrency scams. If scammers can do it, so can political operatives.

Other provinces have given their election officials tools to combat disinformation. Boda asked for legislative authority to address election-related disinformation before the 2020 election. He asked again after 2024. The Sask Party has done nothing.

Let that sink in: we’re in an era where a fake video of a candidate saying something they never said can be created in seconds and spread to thousands of voters before anyone can debunk it, yet the Sask Party has deliberately handcuffed the Chief Electoral Officer’s legal authority to respond.

None of this is an accident. It’s a pattern.

At every turn, when given the choice between modernizing democracy and maintaining illicit power, the Saskatchewan Party chooses increasingly fraudulent, unearned power.

Boda has also recommended - repeatedly - that Saskatchewan needs an entirely new Election Act to replace the outdated 1996 legislation that still governs our elections.

Think about that too - our legislation was created before the internet, before social media… legislation created before the turn of the 21st century, fffs.

Boda’s asked for municipal elections to be moved so they don’t collide with provincial campaigns. He’s flagged the need for better collaboration with First Nations communities to address persistently low voter turnout on reserves.

The response from the Sask Party? Crickets.

Michael Boda supposedly isn’t a political operative. He’s a public servant with a doctorate in electoral administration whose job is to make voting accessible, fair, and trustworthy.

When he says constituency association donations should be transparent, that’s not an NDP talking point. It’s a good-government reform recommended by election experts across Canada.

When he says ballot scanners improve accuracy, he’s not trying to rig elections. He’s trying to reduce human error and get results to voters faster.

When he warns about AI disinformation, he’s not fearmongering. He’s reading the same reports every other election official in the democratic world is reading and sounding the alarm before it’s too late.

The Saskatchewan Party’s refusal to act isn’t about principle. It’s about power. And voters deserve to know that the people who control the rules of our elections are actively blocking reforms that would make those elections more transparent and secure.

Democracy isn’t a favour the government does for us when it feels like it. It’s the foundation they’re supposed to protect, because Saskatchewan MLAs work for us, not the other way around.

Time to remember who actually runs the show around here - that’d be us, not them.

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OurSask Lives Because of Your Support

For years, northern communities have been begging Moe’s Saskatchewan government to treat wildfires as the existential threat they are – not just to forests and cabins, but to homes, power, health care, and basic public safety. Saskatchewan families have watched their houses burn, their elders displaced, their entire communities evacuated for weeks while the premier stayed comfortably south, offered platitudes, and promised that someday, someone would review what went wrong.

Last year, when the fire was way up north in Denare Beach, Scott Moe played golf.

This year, when the fire is in the Nisbet Forest, marching toward Shellbrook – his hometown, his family’s farmland, his political brand – it’s urgent. Last summer matters because it established the hierarchy: in 2025, northern communities were abandoned to absorb the worst wildfire season in Saskatchewan’s recorded history while Scott Moe chased his leadership‑review tail in circles and his government leaned into obscuration, delay and word salads.

More than 16,000 people were displaced. Evacuees waited for support from the province while its government stumbled through the basics of crisis response. The ombudsman had to speak out publicly in order to force the Sask Party to issue wildfire victims an emergency payment of a measly $500.

Whether Moe likes it or not, 2025 is the context in which every later Saskatchewan wildfire response will be judged - and here we are.

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The Nisbet Forest is 80,000 hectares of provincial forest that starts north of Saskatoon in the RM of Duck Lake, moves north up through the RM of Shellbrook, then curls east over and around the north side of the City of Prince Albert.

Sparked on May 26, 2026, the wildfire in Nisbet Forest has been dubbed the “Lobstick Fire” (a choice I’m sure thrills the Waskesui Golf Course.)

By May 28, the blaze had grown to over 13,000 hectares, with loggers warning of up to $25 million in timber losses in the Nisbet Forest.

On May 29 the fire crossed the North Saskatchewan River and triggered an evacuation order in the RM of Shellbrook, with ash literally falling on Moe’s neighbours in town. Patients were being wheeled out of the Shellbrook health centre, families were heading for the Elks Hall or hotels, and volunteers were wiring sprinklers around hamlets like Holbein.

By May 30, the Lobstick Fire had grown to 19,000 hectares — a quarter of the forest and an area roughly the size of the city of Regina — burning about eleven and a half kilometres from the Town of Shellbrook.

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By May 31, it was the largest active wildfire in the province, burning through old‑growth forest that allowed it to spread rapidly.

This year, unlike last, Scott Moe showed up.

On Sunday May 31 he attended a public safety briefing and then spoke to reporters directly from the town of Shellbrook, the smoke from the Lobstick towering nearby — his most visible and personal engagement with an active fire, ever.

He described a “tremendously collaborative effort” between the SPSA, local firefighters, businesses, volunteers.

The next day - Monday, June 1 - Moe held a virtual news conference, where he offered “big, big thanks” and “much love,” and talked authoritatively about using a brief weather window to “box the fire in” and get into a “position of strength.”

In other words, he did what a premier is supposed to do every time this happens, not just when the fire is close enough for his in-laws to smell the smoke.

OurSask Lives Because of Your Support

Northern residents won’t recognize this version of Scott Moe. He is the guy they begged to see last summer, when one of the worst wildfire seasons in Saskatchewan history wiped out hundreds of homes and sent thousands of residents south with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Instead, they got a premier who waited months to visit in-person, apologized to them hundreds of miles away, in the Legislature, only after scrutiny had turned his absence into a political problem.

After last summer’s wildfires, the Sask Party government quietly hired MNP to conduct an “independent review” of the 2025 wildfire response. The promise was that this review would be done by February 2026, or ahead of the next fire season.

February came and went. The MNP report is still locked in Scott Moe’s drawer somewhere in Regina Legislature.

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Civil liberties groups raised Charter concerns.

The NDP Opposition moved 17 amendments to fix glaring problems.

All were rejected and ignored.

But diving into the legislative record and comparing Saskatchewan’s approach to other provinces reveals something far more disturbing: the Saskatchewan Party government is forcing people into addiction treatment in a province that has never bothered to regulate addiction treatment in the first place.

Let that sink in.

The Saskatchewan government, under the vacuous, uneducated, insipid purview of Minister responsible Lori Carr, is forcibly conducting an experiment on our most vulnerable citizens using infrastructure that doesn’t meet even basic regulatory standards…because in Saskatchewan, no standards for it exist.

Unlike Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba and most other provinces, Saskatchewan does not license private addiction treatment centres. Period. While we license personal care homes and approved homes for people with mental health conditions or intellectual disabilities, addiction treatment facilities face no mandatory oversight.

Here, private addiction facilities can operate without inspections, without qualified staff, without evidence-based programming, without any accountability whatsoever. The Saskatchewan Health Authority provides “oversight for contracts” with facilities it funds, but that’s contractual monitoring, not a comprehensive licensing regime.

This means right now, today, someone paying out-of-pocket for addiction treatment in Saskatchewan could be receiving care at a facility that has never been inspected, employs staff with no required qualifications, and delivers programming pulled from thin air.

That’s unconscionable for voluntary treatment.

It’s catastrophic for involuntary detention.

The Compassionate Intervention Act allows three pathways to force someone into treatment: family members can petition a court, police can intervene if substance use creates danger, or prescribed medical professionals can make referrals. Anyone subjected to involuntary treatment gets funneled to a single location: Saskatchewan Hospital in North Battleford, which is a rather notorious psych facility.

Minister Lori Carr emphasized these involuntary beds are “completely separate” from voluntary addictions treatment, with “different funding streams.” But she’s provided no information at all about clinical standards, evidence-based programming requirements, or quality metrics specifically for addiction treatment at this psychiatric hospital.

Treatment length? “Could be three months, it could be a year,” Carr said, with no time limit and evaluation “on an individual basis.”

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Due to the extraordinary level of public interest in the issue, I’m going to publish pieces on the Bell Canada AI Data Centre without a paywall. A huge thank you to those who shared and posted my first piece on this in public forums and on their socials - please feel free to do so again. No amount of propaganda can bury the manner in which this project was rammed through. This conversation is going to matter to Saskatchewan people for a long time - it has to, or we’ve lost all semblance of democracy.

Why has the Government of Canada built a state‑of‑the‑art conveyor belt for AI data centre approvals and subsidies, when virtually no Canadians want them near their community?

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Through his new Major Projects Office (MPO), headquartered in Calgary (admittedly, a genius move), he’s created a streamlined federal channel to shepherd those projects through approvals and into Crown‑backed financing, explicitly identifying a “Canadian sovereign cloud” as an MPO priority, alongside liquid natural gas (LNG), nuclear and critical minerals.

“We are advancing nation-building projects in Canada. The kind of projects and transformative strategies Canada needs to connect our economy, diversify our industries and trade opportunities, and create high-paying careers while protecting the environment and advancing the interests of Indigenous Peoples.” - About Us, Major Projects Office (MPO) website

More specifically, Ottawa’s 2024 Sovereign AI Compute Strategy earmarked $2 billion for these initiatives.

Refer a friend

Then there’s the Alberta deal.

In a single package, Carney ties thousands of megawatts of new AI computing power in Alberta to the construction of a pipeline to BC’s Pacific coastline and the “Pathways” Oil Sands Alliance Carbon Capture Sequestration (CCS) mega-project.

This is where my patience runs out.

Carney has already been explicit about “no Pathways, no pipeline,” staking national energy policy, as well as Saskatchewan’s future oil industry (because it would benefit too from a pipeline next door) on the idea that oil sands-CCS will finally work at scale.

In Saskatchewan, we’ve already lived the CCS miracle cure, then the hangover.

In 2014 sank over a billion dollars into installing it at one of SaskPower’s Boundary Dam coal furnaces, on a promise of world‑leading innovation, jobs, and “clean” coal.

A decade later, it has never consistently hit its capture target, then Saskatchewan people subsidize the penalties we receive for not meeting those contractually-bound targets. What we do capture goes straight into enhanced oil recovery so someone else (in the case of Saskatchewan, Whitecap Resources) can pump more oil.

Any Prime Minister paying attention to this province’s experience would treat CCS as a giant red flag, not a blank cheque. Carney treats it as a talking point.

On the political stump and in the media, the story writes itself in Carney™️ buzz words: AI data centres are Nation Building; a Strategic Investment that will safeguard Canada’s Digital Independence by anchoring us to a Sovereign Cloud, ensuring we are not Left Behind by the United States and China.

“Nation‑building” is meant to make opposition to the plan sound small‑minded or parochial.

If the goal is competitiveness, it’s a fail. This is just corporate welfare dressed up as destiny: public dollars and bespoke process to de‑risk private investment.

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If the goal is security and privacy, that would also be a hard no. We’ve seen no serious conversation about enforceable limits, community oversight, or how Ottawa plans to keep digital information, aka data, “sovereign”.

If the goal is diversification for places like Saskatchewan and Alberta, Carney is effectively telling us that Jeff Bezos’ server farms are the new potash.

It’s a familiar pattern in Canadian Laurentian economic policy that has burned Saskatchewan since its beginnings: sophisticated federal architecture built on consensus amongst Toronto-based elitists and extensive Ontario-based industry input, on a landscape where public consent is conditional at best and hostile at worst.

Meanwhile, Canadians are reading from a completely different script.

Polling shows roughly two‑thirds expect AI data centres to push up electricity prices. Majorities across the country — including right here on the rednecked Prairies — worry about grid pressure, water use and environmental impact.

Surely Carney, largely infallible to-date, but certainly not forever, recognizes the risk he’s setting up for himself and his party.

Against a backdrop of already‑high inflation and rising utility costs, anything that smells like an Ottawa-driven project that will push the cost of living for ordinary Canadians (particularly Western Canadians) even higher is politically toxic. Carney seems to be gambling that voters won’t connect dots, down the line, between their increasing power and water bills and the subsidies and exemptions he’s extending to these monolithic facilities.

That’s a bad bet.

In Saskatchewan, we’ve already run this experiment: billion‑dollar CCS, broken promises, penalties, and a project that enriched a couple of companies while the public carried the risk.

“We’re trying to commercialize that technology through SaskPower and sell it around the world. You know, benefit from it here but maybe expand its use around the world, so we’ll promote that clean coal technology,” - Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall to reporters, Saskatchewan Legislature rotunda, March 3, 2014

Nope.

Didn’t happen - “commercialize” what “technology”? It wasn’t ours to begin with.

Meanwhile, a completely separate false narrative that was also being pushed by the Sask Party government:

“The plan is to capture CO2 emissions from the coal-fired power plant and sell the carbon dioxide to oil and gas companies, which use it to push more oil out of the ground in what’s called enhanced oil recovery.” - Jennifer Graham, Canadian Press for CTV.ca, March 3, 2014

Also no.

Twelve years later, Wall sits on the board of the oil company profiting nicely from the only commercial deal that was ever cut with or on behalf of SaskPower and its carbon capture.

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Thanks to carbon capture Saskatchewan residents got skyrocketing risk on a Crown utility; we’ve got Stephen Harper on a quarter-million dollar Saskatchewan taxpayer-backed retainer and a project that only benefits one or two companies in one or two provincial industries.

Now, the same insulated political mindset is trying to tell us that AI data centres — jarringly loud, lightly-staffed cracker boxes sucking our grids dry — are the next chapter.

Um, no thank you.

For now, the PMO’s narrative is simpler: Mark Carney has created a world-class, globally-unique template in Canada for sprouting AI data centres.

Down the road, the real story will be whether Carney was able to more accurately determine what Canadians needed, than the majority of Canadians had already determined for themselves.

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OurSask Lives Because of Your Support

In 2026.

The Government of Saskatchewan announced it is mailing one to every household in the province, to ask whether it should restrict children under 16 from using social media.

Prepaid postage. Return by mail, by June 30, 2026.

Your handwritten opinion on whether technology is bad for teenagers.

Results “tabulated over the summer.”

Let that sink in.

Never mind that the answer to that particular question has already been researched, polled, and published.

Never mind that seeding is behind and rural Saskatchewan is going bankrupt or blanketed with emergency orders related to fire and unprecedented flooding.

Never mind that Moe himself has cited existing polling showing a majority of Canadians support some form of restrictions; many also say parents — not the government — should be setting and managing those restrictions on their own kids.

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Meanwhile, Manitoba’s premier moved straight to legislation to ban social media and AI chatbots (more on this in a minute) for under‑16s, rather than mailing out a pop quiz. His plan is a distinct regulatory approach focused on leveraging large fines against big tech companies.

“Facebook, Meta, they’re going to spend more money on data centres than the entire size of all of Manitoba’s economy… what is a $100-million fine? It’s nothing. So, the enforcement is going to include a fine framework ... probably with some numbers that have B’s in them.” - Wab Kinew, April 28, 2026, CBC.ca

Swoon.

#chefskiss

Can Kinew enforce it?

Who knows, but at least he was decisive.

Bold, even.

(Wab, call me. You deserve better support telling your story than you’re getting.)

During the 2024 provincial election campaign, Scott Moe declared that his “first order of business” if re‑elected would be to ensure “biological boys will not be in the change room with biological girls” in Saskatchewan schools.

Not healthcare.

Not the mounting provincial debt.

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Not broken resource royalty formulas.

He repeated that promise frequently and aggressively, framing it as a “parental consent” priority, then later admitted he had “misspoken” — that the pledge was something he said “without maybe giving it the proper thought.”

He called himself a “decisive personality” who sometimes needed to “take a breath.”

Now that same guy has turned his keen instincts on to Saskatchewan kids again.

The Sask Party under Scott Moe appears allergic to allowing Saskatchewan parents handle their own children’s lives — whether that means deciding where and how their teenager uses the bathroom, or how much time they spend on Instagram.

What makes this consultation especially galling is that the Saskatchewan government is not lacking for mechanisms to gauge public opinion. It has built, and taxpayers fund, a substantial infrastructure for exactly that purpose.

Each of Saskatchewan’s 61 MLAs receives roughly $77,000 a year for constituency services — nearly $4.7 million across the legislature — and caucus budgets add millions more for research and communications.

No paywall:

The premier has his own personal communications apparatus, as does the government as a whole, and each ministry has its own communications team (Google it).

All that capacity exists supposedly to help MLAs of both stripes understand constituents’ priorities.

Further, Moe has said out loud that he doesn’t think Saskatchewan can — or should — move alone and that a nationwide approach would be more effective.

Scott Moe is right.

Under Canada’s Constitution, communication in our country lives under federal jurisdiction. The federal government licenses broadcasters, regulates telecoms and sets national media policy through agencies like the CRTC. Canadians have been unable to see news on Meta platforms due to a destructive federal law, not a provincial decision.

So why is the premier of Saskatchewan spending public money to mail out postcards about an issue he says is Ottawa’s job?

In the news conference, the premier’s ham‑fisted attempt to be relatable landed like a canned laugh track.

““I’m very much a proponent for us to be outside doing whatever it is we enjoy,” (Moe) told reporters.

For example, he said, his wife likes to sometimes play the violin.” - Canadian Press, May 5, 2026

So…she plays the violin outside?

What?

““I’m outside with anything with a motor, with the family and my extended family that I am with all the time,” Moe said.”

I’m sorry, I know it seems like I’m piling on but who talks like that?

Refer a friend

‘…family that I am with all the time, like a regular normal human being beep boop beep…’

And I hope he means just a motor. No vehicle.

Anyway, back to Nana, glued to her own iPad twenty four seven, chiming in about screen time and the grandkids:

“I truly see the benefits of limiting the amount of time that my grandchildren spend on social media or on a device. The connection that you have with human beings is just irreplaceable.” - Minister Lori Carr, Canadian Press, May 5, 2026

How about you worry about your own screen time when you’re on the floor of the Assembly, Lori.

Also… what “device”?

Is Phase Two of this pantomime the one where the Government of Saskatchewan pries tablets out of Saskatchewan parents’ cold, dead hands?

I thought this was supposed to just be about very distinct social media apps, not Lori Carr’s grandkids or Scott Moe’s wife?

The whole vibe gave desperate, community‑theatre appeal for authenticity: awkward, earnest, and utterly cringeworthy.

What Moe’s postcard delivers is not insight but optics: the performance of consultation, the reiteration of this “parental consent” horseshit nobody asked him for, the costume of diligence, the theatre of listening — all in the most archaic, slow‑motion format available.

This is where the farce gets even more obvious.

I’ll let you look it up yourselves, but the photo dump on Scott Moe’s social channels included a photo of the front of the postcard (which is actually a card, not a postcard) but not the back.

Canada Post handles returned business‑reply mail in bulk.

Unless each card bears a unique identifier keyed to an address (a privacy mess in itself), the province will receive a stack of replies with no reliable way to trace them to particular households or demographics.

The front (inside?) bleats about “parental consent” while only asking about TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and “other”.

Nowhere in this digital witch-hunt is there anything about Signal, Discord, or X (which is a fascinating omission), the platforms where encrypted chats, private servers and rage‑bait algorithms do the most damage.

And hello… AI?

ChatGPT?

We’re going through all this digital hullabaloo without specifically addressing the single biggest tech threat to humanity, already connected to the most recent school shooting in Canada?

If this was truly about understanding online harms, those names would be at the top of the list. Their absence tells you everything about how stupid, shallow, performative and selectively-outraged this “consultation” really is.

While the government spends the spring and summer tabulating postcards about TikTok, our province is wrestling with real, concrete problems the Sask Party will never bother to mail you anything about:

• a ballooning taxpayer‑supported debt that has more than doubled,

• interest payments gobbling roughly a billion tax dollars a year,

• rural emergency room closures,

• ambulance delays,

• understaffed health facilities,

• economic fragility

• lost royalties on potash and energy exports.

These are the issues actually keeping Saskatchewan families awake at night. These are the conversations happening at kitchen tables from Meadow Lake to Estevan.

Not whether Scott Moe has collected enough postcards about YouTube, yet — this is where he puts his time and symbolic energy.

Its main political advantage is cosmetic: a physical, stackable pile of “input” that can be brandished later as proof the government “listened,” regardless of how carefully the questions were framed or how representative the responses were.

It is also a distraction.

While everyone watches the premier hand out stationery, the real problems I just listed above quietly worsen. It’s cheap nonsense that satiates lazy newsrooms and fills headlines without forcing his government to do the expensive, difficult work of actually governing.

Wouldn’t it be a shame if we decided to treat Scott Moe’s prepaid postage charade like the stunt it really is?

Imagine MLA offices receiving postcards covered in stickers, or a handwritten, civil, respectful, but straightforward message for Moe of the householders’ choice - scrawled across the back.

Unions could print stickers with a message; SARM and APAS could include a page in their next mailouts encouraging members to bypass his direction and send Moe what they really think; school boards, parent groups and farm organizations could provide the same for their members for handwritten inspiration.

Imagine.

It won’t happen.

The concept of voters organizing anything remotely constructive for its future seems dead in Saskatchewan.

Parents across this province are perfectly capable of deciding how much screen time is appropriate for their kids. They are also capable of recognizing when a government is performing concern, rather than acting from a place where it’s genuine.

Scott Moe has never learned how to pick his battles, so we all lose.

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