"Foreseeable"

The MNP report, the wildfire failures it couldn't hide, and what Saskatchewan owes the people of Denare Beach.

What follows is not a partisan argument.

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.

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.

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.

$256,503 per year, almost $1.5-million since he took the job: your tax dollars

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.

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:

$216,536 per year: your tax dollars.

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.

-LinkedIn

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

If you’d like to ensure this works exists in the long-term, etransfers are gratefully accepted at tammyrobert0123@gmail.com or by using the donation button below. Thank you.