A Quiet Place (Part 4)
The Saskatchewan Research Council is not only covering up potential wrongdoing, it's firing whistleblowers.
This has been a long story, even for me, so let’s recap.
We first reviewed the Criminal Code charges often associated with government officials, whether public or elected. The nuance is intent, which makes it difficult to prove. We established that Sask Party MLA and senior cabinet munchkin minister Jeremy Harrison has lied prolifically on this issue and many others.
Then we went over the recent history of the Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC).
We learned that Harrison, the minister responsible for SRC since 2015, along with CEO Mike Crabtree have been quietly shifting the SRC’s legislated mandate into that of a commercial profit centre.
A moneymaker.
They have no authority to do that. It would require, at the least, a change in legislation.
I showed you how Crabtree and Harrison have misinformed the Saskatchewan public, by claiming the SRC’s funding comes from doing business with the private sector. The truth is over the last few years, the SRC has been capitalized almost entirely by hundreds of millions of your tax dollars, whether federal or provincial.
In Part 3, you learned Crabtree ushered two of his business partners into SRC leadership roles, without any of the three men sharing this conflict of interest information.
You saw steps taken by Crabtree and Meekins to sole-source, or otherwise involve Meekin’s investment firm (which is also Crabtree’s side hustle), in the funding of a hundred million dollar SRC (aka the government, a lender’s Holy Grail) rare earth element (REE) processing facility.
(That REE facility is a whole other series, cause it’s all kinds of special.)
Believe it or not, this still gets worse before it gets better.
Before we continue, though, let’s cut through the gaslighting that’s convinced alarmingly wide swaths of Saskatchewan people that this is normal.
The risks to any government agency, when its leaders and senior officials do not reject personal conflicts of interest, are severe, multifaceted and unavoidable.
The operational effectiveness, legal standing, public perception, and overall legitimacy of the agency are all degraded. Public confidence is diminished. Private interests take resources away from the public good. Contracts awarded to those with connections, rather than those best qualified, result in poor services and higher costs to us (see: Gary Grewal).
Most obviously, allowing conflicts of interest to persist will send any organization down a path to deeply entrenched, systemic corrupt practices, which are much harder to eliminate and can cause generational damage (see: Grant Devine).
So with that, let’s continue the story of what the hell is going on at the Saskatchewan Research Council.
A canary in the coal mine, if you will.
What you’re about to read is the byproduct of reviewing and cross-referencing leaked government documents, corporate documents, letters and emails, news releases, Hansard and other publicly-available materials.
It also stems from extensive conversations I’ve enjoyed with good people who are, or have been recently, inside the Saskatchewan Research Council. Given Saskatchewan is a place where the government stalks and destroy people who make the wrong sound, I am protecting their identities. As a salute to their bravery for speaking out, nevermind having to endure what they did, I’m not paywalling this post. Please feel free to forward this to whoever you like.
When I left you last, it was March 2021 and SRC director Mike Meekins had just requested he be allowed to contort himself into a fiduciary pretzel. He wanted his firm to privately finance a government project while he sat on the board of that government project.
Instead of being laughed out the door, his request was forwarded to SRC Vice-President Wanda Nyirfa, who forwarded it to the Sask Party’s favorite enabling firm, MLT Aikins.
A few days later, MLT Aikins dutifully provided their standard response: everything the Sask Party government does is fine.
Recuse! Redact! Resolution! A shiny new protocol to sequester all REE information from a board member, ensuring the playing field was level for anyone internal looking to make money off its rare earths program (sarcasm).
Even with this disclosure, two big problems remained:
Meekins had still not disclosed his connection to Crabtree and Herman.
Crabtree and Herman had still not disclosed their connections to Westbridge Capital and Mike Meekins.
With ample opportunity to have done so by this point, one can only assume the omission was deliberate.
With the Meekins’ issue “settled”, spring 2021 meandered into fall. After Scott Moe declared the pandemic over for the 1,439th time, in late October 2021 the SRC’s board of directors met face-to-face.
Something wasn’t right.
A sense of gatekeeping hung heavy over the meeting, with information only being filtered through Crabtree. SRC vice-presidents normally presented their own reports to the board, but that practise had been scrapped.
Internally, alarm bells were ringing as long-time, highly-skilled SRC leaders were pushed out and replaced with less-experienced staff. The executive team faced dysfunction and interpersonal friction from the CEO. Competency issues had emerged, with some sensing that at least a couple incoming hires were being propped up by Crabtree.
Meanwhile, Crabtree was trying, but failing, to convince the board that he should fire even more SRC vice-presidents.
On November 7, 2021, Crabtree advised management and the board that Erin Herman would no longer be a director at the SRC. This was because Herman had been hired, by Crabtree, for a unadvertised, made-up senior management role… in REE. You know, the project their other business partner, SRC director Meekins, wanted to use to make money.
This represented a wild deviation from past and best practices, for a laundry list of reasons, including the fact Erin Herman had no experience in REE.
In early December 2021, a senior staffer at the SRC stumbled upon publicly-available information on the still-undisclosed relationships between Crabtree, Herman and Meekins.
Let’s refer to that individual as Whistleblower 1, or WB1.
Shocked, WB1 took the information to the SRC’s then vice-president of HR (sorry, “Organizational Effectiveness”), Toby Arnold.
That call was no surprise to Arnold. She’d been fielding similar concerns since March 2021, when Meekins came forward (after eighteen months on the board and the Westbridge Capital financing deal was as good as done) to disclose his conflict of interest.
Toby Arnold’s advice for Whistleblower 1 was she and a few other senior leaders (but not all) had known about the problem for months. In fact, in text messages to WB1 regarding the conflicts of interests, Arnold said she had “seen that coming”, therefore had requested she be removed as an officer of the company.
“Not that I’m avoiding the task… just removed myself from some liability,” texted Arnold.
“I was aware (Meekins) was an “owner”. No differnt (sp) than any other investment… just a problem if he uses SRC to advance his holdings/payback and that didn’t happen.”
Except it did happen, Toby.
Arnold, now on a roll, told WB1 that Crabtree and Meekins are even neighbors. She also reiterated the old adage that if a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s around:
“Regardless, it was clear that even if we went ahead with private equity, it would have to go to tender so the potential conflict of interest for (Crabtree) and (Meekins) was prevented. There’s nothing there on that front to dig up. People know about this now.”
This HR professional, earning six figures of your tax dollars, advised WB1 to take it to the board of directors and “stop wasting weekend time on (Crabtree). Have a gin and relax. I am!”
I bet she was.
These are just a few of the issues that were taken to or discussed with Toby Arnold in 2021, which she has openly admitted (to people I’ve spoken to) ignoring:
Crabtree systematically stripped control from the business units.
Crabtree targeted good, solid employees for unwarranted dismissal.
New hires were raw and overwhelmed by the challenges of their portfolio, hindering the entire organization’s progress.
A major staffing reduction in 2020 was not conducted using evidence-driven processes.
Cuts to IT had left the SRC vulnerable and less able to respond to cyberattacks.
Certain board members, including Erin Herman and George Prudat, had been inappropriately interfering in SRC operations.
First Nations commitments? Ummmm no.
Arnold, who had been the director of HR at the SRC for over ten years, has done nothing about any of it.
In fact, guess who got promoted?
That’s right friends, Saskatchewan’s nuclear file is not being led by a nuclear physicist.
Or a physicist.
Or even anyone with a science background.
Jeremy Harrison and Scott Moe are super-serious about nuclear energy in Saskatchewan. So serious that they put a subservient, ineffective HR professional in charge of the file.
Ridiculous.
Saskatchewan is rapidly turning into the dumbest place in the Western world.
In December 2021, WB1 did as instructed by Arnold and took the information to the SRC’s board of directors, which was mostly shocked.
I use “mostly”, because at this point the board was a composite of old-school directors who approached the role professionally and Harrison’s nonqualified patronage appointments, who knew their only assignment was to do Harrison’s bidding.
Then a second whistleblower, who we’ll refer to as WB2, comes forward to the SRC’s board of directors about the Crabtree/Meekins/Herman issue.
An emergency, in-camera board meeting was held right before Christmas 2021.
At the meeting, the board of directors decided it would conduct a review of Crabtree, as well as board conflicts and problems associated with the recruitment of board members, including the lack of vetting.
The board also opted to hire its own legal counsel, which it had every right to do, rooted right in the Act.
An email was sent to Richard Davis, Jeremy Harrison’s chief of staff, advising him that there were issues at the SRC, but without specifics. A follow-up call was held right before New Year’s, where Davis was told about the whistleblowers, as well as the conflict of interest issues.
On January 6, 2022, Mike Crabtree sent another email to the SRC, advising that WB1 had been “released from employment”, effective immediately.
Exactly one week later, WB2 was similarly let go.
In addition to suspicious as hell, this was all in violation of Saskatchewan’s Public Interest Disclosure Act. In 2017 the Ombudsman nicely summed up the impact of this deliberately weak piece of legislation, which is supposedly to protect whistleblowers:
A few days after the firings, a phone conversation was held between the SRC’s board chair, Dennis Fitzpatrick, and Jeremy Harrison, to discuss the growing crisis. The conversation prompted Fitzpatrick to write a rather pointed follow up letter (red emphasis is mine).
Fitzpatrick putting it in writing infuriated Harrison.
Remember, this is the kind of lie Jeremy Harrison tells to coverup his influence over the SRC board:
After receiving Fitzpatrick’s letter, Harrison had a meltdown and fired both the chair and vice-chair of the board he later claimed he’s “not very involved in”.
Presumably Herman was removed at the same time because he’d already been a salaried SRC employee for two months. Whoops.
Three days later, incompetent Harrison reinstated both men to the board.
SRC board chair and vice-chair Dennis Fitzpatrick and Janusz Kozinski did not know they were fired and rehired until six months later, when someone showed them the above Orders in Council.
I’m not going to get into how the hell these two Orders in Council were signed off by Scott Moe’s cabinet AND our useless Lieutenant Governor, Russ Merasty, in the span of three days, because this is not a serious government.
It’s a clown show.
Anyway, someone reminded Harrison that he’s not supposed to run public agencies until his diaper’s been changed and he’s had a nap. After secretly firing, then rehiring the chair and vice-chair, Harrison sends this letter in reply to Fitzpatrick:
There’s no chance had Harrison had received “serious concerns” about Dennis Fitzpatrick’s conduct.
That’s the kind of lie Putin tells after shoving one of his men out of a seventh-storey window.
It’s also the standard response from a frightened Sask Party government when it feels threatened: the problem isn’t the problem, you’re the problem for bringing it up.
Also, note Harrison’s final inappropriate instruction, that the SRC “Board take no matters of a substantive or significant consequences into consideration.”
Would that be “matters” such as the board’s decision, the month before, to investigate internal dysfunction and conflicts of interests regarding a SRC financing deal that you’ve already personally greenlit, Jeremy?
Is that what the board should stop doing?
Okay then.
We also need to talk about longtime public servant Cam Swan, who I’ll be referring to as ‘The Cleaner’ from here out, because that’s all he does - cleans up the Sask Party government’s bodies.
For example, The Cleaner was also put in charge of reviewing the state of tire recycling in Saskatchewan. We know how that turned out.
A few days after Harrison suspended board activity, the following letter arrived at the SRC, signalling the Ministry of Justice was now involved:
I’m struggling to find the rights words to explain how wrong it was that the Ministry of Justice waded into a whistleblowing investigation, or any investigation involving public service personnel.
We’re getting into dystopian territory here, folks.
Remember, the Sask Party has empowered itself to arrest you.
Anyway.
At the time Harrison put him in charge of reviewing the SRC, Swan had been deputy premier to Scott Moe since 2018, including through the pandemic.
That should tell you anything else you need to know about Cam Swan.
In the case of the SRC, The Cleaner did not speak to any individual involved in the review he was allegedly conducting. Instead, a month after it began, Swan sent the results of his “review” back to the SRC board:
Nothing to see here.
Not only was it bullshit, but Swan’s involvement means Scott Moe was now involved… though make no mistake, he always was. There’s a reason these idiots are pulling this shady crap, but we won’t know the specifics until they blessedly leave public office and like Brad Wall, are rewarded with private stock options.
Within days of Swan’s letter, Harrison terminates Fitzpatrick and Kozinski once again. George Prudat, a painfully nonqualified buddy of Harrison’s, is appointed chair of the SRC.
Shortly after that, a lawyer from the Sask Party’s sanitation firm, MLT Aikins, went behind the SRC board’s back and fired the lawyer it had hired to assist it in maneuvering this dumpster fire.
Why did the SRC board need to hire a lawyer?
Because according to the SRC Act, the board can be held legally liable, can sue, or be sued on behalf of the organization. The SRC Act makes clear, in at least two sections, that the board can contract whoever or whatever it wants, including legal counsel.
Further, SRC directors have a fiduciary duty, meaning they have accepted personal responsibility for the subject and are supposed to act for its benefit, not their own. For example, a doctor has a fiduciary duty to his or her patient.
In a corporation, including non-profits, the board of directors and the officers have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders and the corporation itself. These laws (yes, they’re laws, with real consequences) are governed by the The Business Corporations Act, 2021.
In fact, let’s have MLT Aikins explain why it had absolutely no business firing the lawyer hired by the SRC’s board of directors. The brass ball on those lawyers are unbelievable. But, the SRC’s board’s lawyer went quietly - understandably unwilling, like so many other people in this province, to fight the Sask Party government.
A year later, the final two ‘original’ board members were removed from the board (terms don’t expire).
Today, Mike Crabtree and Jeremy Harrison have full control over the SRC - specifically, the nuclear and rare earth elements file. Harrison has suspended independent board oversight, swapping it for his friends and corrupt hires.
There has been no justice for the whistleblowers. What are their options, besides report government wrongdoing directly to a government that refuses to respect, or even acknowledge the only mechanisms available to hold them accountable?
That’s why, by the way, we’ve only got the Criminal Code left through which to filter these behaviours. The Sask Party has stupidly boxed itself in, rejecting the only tools it has to defend itself from allegations of corruption.
I’m not done with this story.
I’m so fed up with the Sask Party’s elitist podunks using the Saskatchewan government, Saskatchewan people and our public assets to get rich. We’re going to be talking about it right until the day we next vote. The angles here are plentiful and must be properly analyzed, because the SRC is not the only Saskatchewan government agency being ran into the ground by people only in it for themselves.
We need to talk about the Saskatchewan NDP. They know things are terribly wrong at the SRC. They knew the specifics of this issue back in 2022, but the little they’ve done with it is really nothing more than embarrassing.
In what post-Randy Weekes world is the Sask NDP ignoring more hard evidence that Jeremy Harrison is an unlikeable douchebag, a good idea?
We should also analyze why so many good people did nothing.
We talked about senior executive Toby Arnold, but not SRC CFO Ryan Hill. Both knew of the problem as early as March 2021, yet still allowed the Westbridge Capital financing deal to proceed before Mike Meekins was finally forced to disclose his conflicts. They also did nothing to help their longtime colleagues.
Collectively, a number of minor characters made it possible for the major players to act.
The Sask Party government is rotten to the core. If you’re working in it, get out. Don’t prop up a corrupt, toxic regime. If you can’t leave, then find a way to start digging and/or talking. Share what you know about the wrongdoing all around you with someone. Anyone.
Meantime, it is up to us to demand better. Whistleblowing is a once in a lifetime activity and good public servants don’t take it lightly. The process must be open, accessible and confidential. Public servants who provide inside information essential to holding the provincial government accountable must be protected.
Because just like in the movies, silence in not the answer.
Instead you gotta make some noise, lure in the monster and put a spike through its brain.
Til next time,
Saskatchewan media and newsrooms cannot and are not getting you the information you need to live in a healthy, democratic province anymore. I’m doing my best to continue to bring as much of it to you, as fast as I can. If you’d like to support my work beyond your subscription, for costs like the multiple subscriptions and accounts I need to access and purchase information provided in posts like this one, etransfers are gratefully accepted at tammyrobert0123@gmail.com. Every dollar helps keep me and this work going.