Here's Everything the Sask Party Has (N)Ever Done To Mitigate Saskatchewan's GHG Emissions
The time, money and effort spent on the appearance of doing something, while actually doing nothing at all, is staggering.
Warning: this is a long, complex read, just like it was a long, complex piece to write. However, I think the information is important, so take your time.
According to the Canada Energy Regulator, Saskatchewan's greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 were 65.9 MT per capita. Kuwait, the seventh largest oil producer in the world, was at 21.6 MT per capita in 2018, while Qatar was 32.4MT and and Bahrain 19.6MT.
Back in 2016, per capita emissions in BC, Ontario, and Quebec were in the 10-14MT range.
There are two main contributors to Saskatchewan’s disastrous emissions profile:
SaskPower, specifically coal-fired electricity generation;
Extraction of Saskatchewan’s natural oil and gas resources.
As Canada burns, here’s virtually everything the Sask Party has ever said or “done” about climate change and reducing Saskatchewan’s outsized per capita emissions.
Literal hot air.
The first thing you need to know is it was always carbon capture… the Saskatchewan answer has always been carbon capture.
In the run-up to the 2007 election, the Saskatchewan NDP government decided it was time to get serious about climate change, which it absolutely was not in the years previous.
The Sask Party Opposition’s response was predictable:
2007 Sask Party Platform
The issue was big enough in 2007 that a power-hungry Sask Party included eighteen references to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in its election platform, including:
Once elected, the fledgling Sask Party government was so passionate about fighting climate change that it chose Earth Day to announce a rather ambitious GHG emissions target: “reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 32 per cent by 2020”.
32 per cent!
"When we talk about Earth Day, we are really talking about the choices we make each day and the impact those choices have on the environment," Environment Minister Nancy Heppner said. "Our government is committed to making sure the people of Saskatchewan have the support they need to make informed choices that contribute to the health of our environment." - Government of Saskatchewan news release, April 22, 2008.
I wonder if Nancy hates herself now for even suggesting such a thing.
So committed to saving the environment were they in 2008, the Sask Party even pondered putting emissions targets into law:
Meanwhile in the Saskatchewan Legislature, the Saskatchewan NDP were taking the issue about as seriously in 2009 as the Sask Party, asking the hard-hitting, relevant questions:
2009: Enter the Saskatchewan Technology Fund…and the Sask Party’s Carbon Tax
May 11, 2009: Bill No. 95, The Management and Reduction of Greenhouse Gases Act is introduced in the Saskatchewan Legislature for the first time. Gone is the Sask Party’s election commitment to reduce GHG emissions in Saskatchewan by 32 percent from 2006 levels by 2020. That number is now 20 percent, in line with Stephen Harper’s federal government’s target, which is about to be reduced again.
The entire plan hinges on something called the Saskatchewan Technology Fund.
More on that in a bit.
December 1, 2009: Bill No. 126 — A revised Management and Reduction of Greenhouse Gases Act, is introduced in the Legislature by then-Environment Minister Nancy Heppner.
At the time the legislation includes a carbon tax.
“Our government has adopted a target of emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 from 2006 levels… A carbon compliance price will be set which is competitive with developments in the US, Canada, and the rest of the world. …” - Environment Minister Nancy Heppner, December 2, 2009, Saskatchewan Legislature
In December 2009, after initially refusing to even attend the meetings, Stephen Harper signed the Copenhagen Accord, committing Canada to a national greenhouse gas reduction target of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.
May 3, 2010: Final reading of Bill No. 126 — The Management and Reduction of Greenhouse Gases Act, however the Act won’t be passed into law for another eight years, and then only in part.
June 23, 2010: Stephen Harper’s Government of Canada announces it will take “sector by sector” action to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector, moving forward first with regulations on coal-fired generation.
In December 2010 SaskPower announced $354-mil would be spent to rebuild coal-fired Boundary Dam 3 generating plant.
Before we continue, here’s a quick primer on SaskPower’s coal capacity, which is comprised of three plants.
Boundary Dam Power Station at Estevan is one power plant with six coal-fired units in total.
The first two units (Boundary Dam 1 and 2) were commissioned in 1959, then shut down and decommissioned in 2014, or 55 years later.
As we just learned, Boundary Dam 3 was rebuilt from 2010 to 2013, then retrofitted with over a billion dollars worth of carbon capture.
It has always blown my mind that not only did we spend well over a billion dollars on carbon capture, we spent it to outfit only one of the six furnaces burning at Boundary Dam.
Poplar River Power Station is located at Coronach, Saskatchewan.
Shand Power Station, also in Estevan, is just one unit.
Never Fear, CCS Is Here
April 2011: Sask Party announces $1.24-billion will be spent to retrofit Boundary Dam 3 with carbon capture and storage (CCS) capacity, the first of its kind in the world.
“You don’t spend $1.2-billion on anything unless you make darn sure it’s economically viable for us to do that.” - Robert Watson, President & CEO SaskPower on decision to move ahead with CCS. May 2, 2011 Regina Leader Post
March 11, 2011: After a powerful earthquake triggers a tsunami, a nuclear accident occurs at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, Fukushima, Japan, putting a chill on nuclear power development for years to come.
August 19, 2011: Harper’s government releases Reduction of Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Coal-Fired Generation of Electricity Regulations. Coal-fired units would need to meet new performance standards or be fitted with carbon capture technology if they are operated past a lifespan of 45 years.
The new regs for coal are announced at a news event at SaskPower’s Boundary Dam 3, by Stephen Harper’s Environment Minister Peter Kent.
The Sask Party was fully supportive.
“Saskatchewan Environment Minister Dustin Duncan said the federal announcement provides regulatory certainty that a company such as SaskPower needs to make decisions.” - August 20, 2011, Regina Leader-Post
2011 Sask Party Platform
The tone on climate change is decidedly less urgent. There are only two references to reducing GHG emissions in this platform, including:
April 27, 2012: Liz Quarshie, then-deputy minister in Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Environment, tells a committee meeting in the Saskatchewan Legislature that her ministry has
“…ongoing engagement with SaskPower to talk about the proposed federal (coal-fired) framework... Saskatchewan provided comments by a letter from the minister late last fall, around October… We’ve participated in economic impact analysis of the regulation on SaskPower and the province.”
So in other words, everyone was playing nice in the sandbox.
In yet another news event in Saskatchewan (this time in Saskatoon) on September 5, 2012, Peter Kent announces updated, softened regulations for coal-fired units. According to the new proposal:
Coal-fired units commissioned before 1975 will have to shut down after 50 years (an increase from the original 45 years) or at the end of 2019, whichever comes earlier.
Units commissioned between 1975 and 1986 must be shuttered after 50 years, or at the end of 2029, whichever comes first.
This means that because Shand’s coal-fired unit was commissioned in 1992, it would not need to be closed until 2042. Everything else would be closed by 2029.
A SaskPower executive tells Postmedia that the new regs strike a “good balance”, and Robert Watson wrote an editorial singing its praises:
Yep, in 2012 SaskPower’s CEO was still pushing 300 more years of coal.
Something tells me Robert Watson’s legacy isn’t going to be what he had planned.
But I digress.
In a disturbing pattern that would eventually apply to almost every issue, by 2013 the Sask Party was blaming the Saskatchewan NDP for the Sask Party’s lack of action or progress on reducing emissions.
On May 1, 2013, Ken Cheveldayoff was lucky Saskatchewan’s Environment Minister and advised the Legislature: “…looking at the history and the massive increases that took place from 1991 to 2007, having it plateau is better than that alternative, but going forward we’d like to see a decrease.”
By May 8, 2013, Wall was gaslighting Question Period on all of it: “We took office, Mr. Speaker, and we moved to act with respect to renewable energies, not just talk about them, but act. And so from 2008 to 2013, if the member wants to know, let’s talk about low carbon technologies in Saskatchewan, the investments made by this government: SaskPower Boundary dam 3 clean coal project, 1.24 billion…”
“Fast forward five years later, Mr. Minister, and we still don’t have the Saskatchewan Technology Fund, we still don’t have the Climate Change Foundation….In 2005 our provincial emissions were in the range of 71 megatonnes. We are now looking at 74 — this is 2011 — so it’s gone up. And their projection based on what’s on the ground right now is that by 2020 we will likely remain at 74 megatonnes here in Saskatchewan alone…carbon capture and sequestration (accounts for) only one-seventieth of the emissions that are being produced in this province right now. I’m very, very interested, Mr. Minister, in what you intend to do with the other 69 of the 70 portions…So I would like to hear your detailed strategic plan for reducing emissions.” - NDP critic Cathy Sproule, Saskatchewan Legislature, March 31, 2014
Chevy’s enlightened response that day:
“…if we’re going to meet (reduced GHG emission) targets it’s going to be through innovation… through a technology fund. It’s through being able to work together with the private sector… going to work with the federal government and I know the federal government wants to work with other nations as well.”
Kumbaya. Oh, and there’s that technology fund again. Someone sure wants a technology fund.
At this point Stephen Harper has been taking a “sector by sector” approach for nine years, with nothing firm in place for coal and no produced guidelines or proposed regulations for the oil and gas sector.
Stephen Harper was never going to set emissions standards for oil and gas because the only mechanism he could evoke was a carbon tax.
April 2014: Federal report from Environment Canada shows Saskatchewan is now producing the highest levels of GHG emissions in its history.
The Sask Party did not give a single f**k because won’t someone think of the economy:
Now it’s 2015 and Scott Moe is Saskatchewan’s Environment Minister. Yay us!
“…this government will always balance the economic and population growth that we have in the province of Saskatchewan with the environmental protection in this province of Saskatchewan.” - then-Minister of the Environment Scott Moe, Saskatchewan Legislature, May 7, 2015
On October 19, 2015 the federal Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau, won 184 seats in the federal election, forming a majority government.
In December of 2015, Brad Wall was dragged kicking and screaming attended a climate summit in Paris, along with other Canadian premiers and newly-minted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. At that summit an agreement was drafted between countries on mitigating climate change.
In an early January committee meeting in 2016, SaskPower’s vice-president of planning, Guy Bruce, foreshadowed the Sask Party’s upcoming election platform (sorta) when he said, “…our projection for reaching 50 per cent renewables by capacity by 2030…Well it will be 40 per cent reduction by 2030…. our plan right now shows us between . . . around the 14 million mark in 2020. Yes. In 2025 we’ll be starting some more significant reductions.”
Got that? Might be 50, might be 40. He’ll know when the Sask Party tells him what it is… as opposed to, you know… science, logic and thoughtful analysis.
In February of 2016, Justin Trudeau met with Canadian premiers to discuss the Paris summit and to draft a similar agreement between provinces. Brad Wall attended those meetings, where he officially kicked off his anti-carbon tax crusade.
After garnering all kinds of beloved attention with an epic meltdown, Wall went on to sign the Vancouver Accord anyway. To be fair, Trudeau was forced to back away from including a minimum national price of $15 per ton of carbon in the Accord, instead forming a working group on carbon pricing.
Trudeau went on to formally sign the document known as the Paris Agreement at the UN in New York in April of 2016. Through the Paris Agreement, the Canadian government committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030.
This is the exact same target set by the previous Conservative government under Stephen Harper.
2016 Sask Party Platform
There is only one reference to reducing emissions in the Sask Party’s platform. They won by a landslide.
It’s now June 27, 2016 and SaskPower exec Guy Bruce is back in a Legislature committee meeting with an update. He also comes out with a stronger commitment to an emissions reduction than stated in the Paris Agreement.
“…our goal to reduce emissions 40 per cent by 2030, and one of the ways that we’re doing that is…going to 50 per cent renewables. The coal fleet, so Boundary dam 1 and 2, have already retired. Boundary dam 3 has been converted to carbon capture. Units 4 and 5, according to federal regulations, would retire at the end of 2019, and we do have plans in place to replace that capacity should that happen…. Carbon capture and storage is still an option that we’re considering for those units. The other work that we’re doing is there’s work underway with a potential for an equivalency agreement (on coal-fired generation)…looking at all of those options to get through the period 2020 to 2025.”
Your key takeaway from the above quote is that in 2016, SaskPower had plans in place to responsibly phase out coal-fired Boundary Dam 4 and 5 by 2019.
October 4, 2016 - Justin Trudeau announces he will unilaterally apply a carbon tax to provinces that don’t do it themselves. As a result, Moe and a couple other Environment Ministers walk out of a meeting with Catherine McKenna.
So respectful.
A few days later, Mandryk asks questions he should have asked when Moe became Premier.
Scooter Moe got his first taste of international travel in November 2016 when he attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Morocco, to the taxpayer-backed tune of $45,000.
A few days after he returned, on November 21, 2016, federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna announced Canada was accelerating the phase out the use of coal-fired electricity in Canada to 2030 as part of its national clean-energy strategy.
Brad Wall took the news about as well as you might expect.
This was the first new federal government change to standards impacting coal-fired power production since the regulations Peter Kent announced in Saskatoon in 2012. Because the province of Nova Scotia had already been working on coal-phase out, McKenna announced they would receive an extension on 2030.
Yet even after all the rage Wall farmed, just one week later, on November 28, 2016, a Government of Sask news release entitled Saskatchewan, Federal Government Work Together on Equivalency Agreement boasted that an equivalency agreement on coal had finally been agreed “in principle” with Trudeau’s government:
“The Province of Saskatchewan and Government of Canada have reached an agreement in principle to finalize an equivalency agreement for Canada’s existing coal-fired regulation... This agreement is good news for Saskatchewan’s environment and the provincial economy,” Environment Minister Scott Moe said. “We can proceed with our aggressive plan to move to 50 per cent renewable energy generation capacity by 2030, cutting emissions by 40 per cent over 2005 levels. Saskatchewan can also continue to use coal in a responsible manner beyond 2030 as long as equivalent emission reduction outcomes are achieved.” - November 28, 2016 Government of Sask news release, Saskatchewan, Federal Government Work Together on Equivalency Agreement
You’ll note there wasn’t a peep about having the goal posts moved or anything being “changed”. The plan was the Saskatchewan would be allowed to meet or improve upon federal emission requirements on a system-wide basis, as opposed to being forced to regulate each coal-fired plant.
Meanwhile, day after day, week after week for years, morons like this one have been pumping toxic, torqued political rhetoric, without a shadow of a doubt coordinated directly with Brad Wall and the Sask Party, all over the Saskatchewan electorate in both broadcast and print.
On December 6, 2017, despite the fact that the formal equivalency agreement breathlessly announced as having been agreed “in principle” the year before had not actually been signed with the federal government, a Goverment of Saskatchewan news release proudly announced that the Sask Party Government Introduces Coal-Fired Electricity Regulations:
“As committed to in Prairie Resilience: A Made-in-Saskatchewan Climate Change Strategy, the Government of Saskatchewan today passed regulations on coal-fired electricity as a next step toward an equivalency agreement with the federal government… financial and regulatory flexibility to continue operating coal units past their federal shutdown date…Under provincial regulation, future electricity emissions are expected to outperform federal expectations.”
Hell… we weren’t just going to do it, we were going to do it better than Justin Trudeau!
January 27, 2018, Scott Moe is elected leader of the Sask Party and by extension, Premier of Saskatchewan.
By May 15, 2018, the effervescent Dustin Duncan (is there anything he can’t f**k up?) is Saskatchewan’s Environment Minister.
That day Dusty told a committee meeting he had plans:
“…my intent is to bring a series of decisions before the cabinet in terms of performance standards… through offsets or technology fund or some combination of other types of mechanisms…we’ve said the plan in place from now till 2030 from SaskPower will see a 40 per cent reduction in terms of our electrical generation in the emission reduction profile. We’ve committed to 40 to 45 per cent reduction in methane emissions through regulations that will come forward later this year on the oil and gas industry…”
There’s that technology fund again…at this point the Sask Party has been talking about it for a decade.
You’ll note Duncan restated the Sask Party’s commitment to 40 per cent emissions reduction by 2030. However, he also wanted the committee to know that even if Saskatchewan does its part, we’re all doomed anyway:
“Because I will say this, that you know, we’re 75, 76 million tonnes a year in terms of emissions. Even if we reduce that to zero, which I’m not proposing that we’re going to be able to do, but even if we reduce that to zero, we know that what’s going on around the world is going to take up those 75, 76 million tonnes in a short amount of time…” - Dustin Duncan, May 15, 2018, Saskatchewan Legislature
I bet he’s fun at parties.
A month later, in a June 13, 2018 committee meeting, Saskatchewan’s Provincial Auditor threw cold water all over the Sask Party’s decade of hot air on emissions reduction:
“Our key findings at January 2017 relating to mitigation were that the (Sask Party) government had not established provincial greenhouse gas reduction targets; … It had not implemented a province-wide mitigation plan… had not developed processes to monitor progress on greenhouse gas emissions…Our key findings at January 2017 related to adaptation were that it did not have an overarching adaptation plan.” - Provincial Auditor Judy Ferguson, June 13, 2018, Saskatchewan Legislature
In other words, the Provincial Auditor’s position was that as of January 2017, despite the Sask Party’s insistence they were all over it, there had never been a real plan to reduce Saskatchewan’s GHG emissions.
It was all theatre.
Smoke, Mirrors: Lying.
A few weeks after that summer 2018 meeting - and a mere six months after Scooter became Premier - things got even worse (in hindsight, that checks out)
“In the fall of 2016 the federal government issued revised regulations around emissions from conventional coal-fired power stations, which essentially said every power station in the country had to shut down by the end of 2029, 2030,” said SaskPower CEO Mike Marsh in a June 27, 2018 committee meeting at the Saskatchewan Legislature.
Marsh is referring to the November 2016 announcement made by Catherine McKenna, overriding the targets Peter Kent announced in 2012.
“All of our conventional coal was scheduled to be retired sometime in the next decade, so between 2027 for Boundary dam unit 6; for Poplar River 1 and 2 it is 2029; and for Shand it was originally 2042, as I’d indicated…So that advanced the retirement date or a decision to convert to carbon capture.”
Oh no, not Shand!
In the same meeting, Dustin Duncan’s mouth was moving so he lied:
“…the equivalency only affects the retirement date for 4 and 5. The Shand retirement date has been changed because of the change in the federal regulation in 2016. Prior to that, under the former federal government, we had the end of 2029 or the end of life of the facility, which for Shand meant 2042.”
The coal-fired equivalency agreement - the one breathlessly agreed in principle in late 2017, which by this point still hadn’t been signed off - was absolutely not created just for Boundary Dam 4 and 5. That’s a lie, or incompetency… one or the other. Maybe both.
May 2 and 3, 2019 - Catherine McKenna and Dustin Duncan sign the blessed coal-fired equivalency agreement.
At the end of May 2019, Saskatchewan’s Court of Appeals issued a split decision rendering the federal carbon plan constitutional and off to the Supreme Court we went.
In committee on September 17, 2019 SaskPower CEO Mike Marsh reiterates the coal shutdown plan and the new, bizarre hand-wringing about Shand.
“The shutdown dates for unit 4 are currently December 31st, 2021 in the case of unit 4, and for unit 5, it’s December 31st, 2024…Boundary dam 6 retirement date is 2027, end of 2027. Poplar River 1 and 2 are end of 2029. And I think we’ve talked about this in the past, Shand originally was end of 2041. But the regulations changed under the new federal government that rather than end of life or 2030…”
Once again Dustin Duncan chimes in with even stupider and somehow, even falser information:
“…I’ll just note for the record that June 26th and 27th, I spent those two days with Minister McKenna and there was no signal that these changes were coming out the day after the meetings ended.”
As we established earlier, the regulations came out in November 2016 after McKenna and Moe attended the climate change summit in Morocco…not in June. What an absolute numpty Duncan is, my god.
At this point you may be wondering… what about carbon capture? If carbon capture saved Boundary Dam unit 3 - for a cool $1.4-bil (probably much more) - why can’t it save Shand?
“I know there’s been some work at a pretty high level on the feasibility of the Shand unit, but I think a significant amount of due diligence and analysis needs to go further into that before we make a decision,” said Mike Marsh.
So the billions of dollars already spent on the Sask Party’s little carbon capture experiment at Boundary Dam (first in the world!) wasn’t enough due diligence?
Fabulous.
So much competency in that room that day.
In September 2019 SaskPower announced it was shutting down its popular net metering program, which credited customers for energy they produced and contributed to the grid. The credit was banked and carried forward month-to-month, for up to three years. There was also a rebate for up to 20 percent of installation costs, capped at $20,000.
On December 1, 2019, Scott Moe signed a memorandum of understanding with Ontario and New Brunswick with regards to the development of small modular reactors (SMRs).
2020 Sask Party Platform
Whatever. At this point I think we can agree there is nothing credible about the Sask Party and their climate change mitigation plans.
In March of 2021 the Sask Party lost again when the Supreme Court of Canada confirmed the constitutionality of the federal government’s carbon reduction plans, including the carbon tax.
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On August 24, 2021 SaskPower vice-president Troy King stated clearly that Boundary Dam 4 was scheduled for “laying up” at the end of that year (2021), with Boundary Dam 5 scheduled for “laying up” in 2024. He uses the term “laying up” because he says 4 and 5 can’t be fully decommissioned while the other units are still running.
“The final decommissioning date will be when the last unit is retired,” said King. “So right now we have that set around the mid-2040s for the full decommissioning of the facility.”
There’s that 2040ish date again. You just saw that in 2019, CEO Mike Marsh had said Boundary Dam 6 was slated for shut down in 2027.
In October 2021 Mike Marsh announced he was leaving SaskPower effective December 31, 2021.
In November of 2021 at the UN's COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, U.K., Prime Minister Justin Trudeau aggressively promoted the Canadian government's vision for climate action, including:
calling for world leaders to come together to triple the amount of global greenhouse gas emissions covered by a price on carbon to 60 per cent by 2030;
a cap on Canadian oil and gas emissions and a goal of net-zero emissions in the oil and gas sector by 2050;
a commitment toward achieving net-zero emissions within Canada's electricity grid by 2035, which was in his party's platform during the federal election campaign held two months before the Glasgow summit.
Meanwhile, back in Saskatchewan… despite SaskPower’s insistence things were on track mere weeks beforehand, Boundary Dam 4 was not shut down in December 2021, as had been planned for years. More on that in a minute.
In March of 2022 Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change and Saskatchewan’s arch nemesis, Steven Guilbeault, launched consultations on Canada’s Clean Electricity Standard (CES), with the goal of progressing to a national net-zero electricity grid by 2035.
In April 2022 Scott Moe uttered some of the dumbest comments on the issue he’s ever made. That takes effort.
In remarks to a Chamber of Commerce event in Prince Albert, Scott Moe informed the crowd "A lot of folks will come to me and say, 'Hey, you guys have the highest carbon emissions per capita. 'I don't care,'" said Moe during the speech.
When pressed on his stupidity Scooter doubled down, telling reporters:
"I would put forward that anyone that is talking about per capita emissions really doesn't care about climate change in any way," - Scott Moe, April 2022
Amazing.
Speaking of amazing, here’s one of the latest clowns on Saskatchewan’s neverending wheel of Environment Ministers, Warren Kaeding, sharing information in the Saskatchewan Legislature on April 12, 2022 on the plan to reduce emissions:
“The other thing to certainly get on record is our tech fund. And you’re going to find that the tech fund is going to be coming on stream here soon…tech fund to support other emissions reduction innovations… not sure of how many companies are going to be contributing to the tech fund…unfortunately I can’t give you a number or even an estimate right now because there’s just too many things that we don’t have a complete answer to yet.” - Environment Minister Warren Kaeding, Saskatchewan Legislature, April 12, 2022
That’s same tech fund announced by Nancy Heppner thirteen years ago in 2009… and not only has it never been established, they can’t even explain it in 2022.
In November 2022 one of Scott Moe’s other personalities was summoned for a brief appearance.
In a committee meeting in December of 2022, the rookie CEO explained that, after years and years of planning, Boundary Dam 4 was not shut down the year prior as planned.
“…safe standby would have required SaskPower to disconnect gas and electrical from that unit and then leave it in the safe mode. That did not occur. So in fact we didn’t incur any costs to bring BD4 back online.”
Yes, this actual genius detailed that there were no costs involved in shutting down 4, because it was never shut down.
Why?
“You’ll know that the hydrology in Manitoba was particularly poor the year prior, and out of an abundance of caution, we’ve left BD4 up and running to ensure that we had reliable power.” - Rupen Pandya, CEO SaskPower, December 20, 2022, Saskatchewan Legislature.
In other words, contradicting his predecessors, Pandya’s excuse was there was no contingency or backup power planned to replace the energy produced by Boundary Dam 4.
It was always theatre.
Today Boundary Dam 4 is still up and running. Toxic oilfield apologist Brian Zinchuk gloated about it earlier this year.
In May of 2023 Scott Moe went scorched earth once and for all, releasing Saskatchewan's plan for electricity generation.
"The federal government's standards for zero emissions electrical generation by 2035 are unrealistic and unaffordable. They mean SaskPower rates would more than double and we may not have enough generation to keep the lights on. I'm not going to let that happen." - Scott Moe, May 16, 2023 Government of Sask news release
That’s right.
Even though:
under Stephen Harper, all of Saskatchewan’s coal-fired units except one (Shand) would need to be shuttered by 2029, which was totally fine by the Sask Party;
both Harper and Trudeau’s government indicated they would accept carbon capture technology to preserve coal-burning power units and Saskatchewan has already spent close to two billion dollars testing it, but we’re apparently not interested in using it for any of the other 8 coal-burning units we’ve got (wonder why?);
in 2016 SaskPower’s vice-president clearly stated that the company had a plan to efficiently and responsibly shut down Boundary Dam 4 and 5 by 2019;
in 2009 the Sask Party announced its own carbon tax;
by 2014 Ontario had completely phased out coal-fired electricity;
other provinces have successfully negotiated commitments with both Harper and Trudeau’s government;
a “technology fund” for emissions producers has been sitting dormant for thirteen years;
the Sask Party has had 7 years to come up with its own federally-acceptable emissions reduction plan and has refused…
…etc etc etc… Scott Moe says it can’t be done.
Because F**k Trudeau, right?
The release announcing we can’t do it includes quotes from… wait for it… two Saskatchewan meat packers and the CEO of an oil and gas company for which Brad Wall sits as a director and major shareholder.
I can’t even finish typing that sentence without LOLOLOLOLOLing.
The bottom line is in 2023, Scott Moe announced he was torching every single measure and iota of progress Saskatchewan made on decommissioning coal-fired electricity production - a process well under way in every other coal-using province - and will do whatever he wants til whenever he wants, national targets be damned.
Paris Agreement? What agreement? Vancouver Accord? Never heard of it.
Commitments? What commitments?
That day, Scott Moe rendered Saskatchewan’s word on literally any national or international issue completely meaningless. We are a laughing stock and will be a pariah to anyone who takes a few minutes and looks at the fraudulent stunt on emissions mitigation committed by the Sask Party government since the day it took office.
Which brings us to last week, August 10, 2023, when Canada’s Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault released Ottawa's proposed Clean Electricity Regulations. In good news for Saskatchewan, the proposed regs allow for natural gas power generation.
In not so good news for Saskatchewan, including its many private sector technology investors, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson vaguely told a press conference in Vancouver that accessing the refundable 15% clean electricity investment tax credit introduced in the federal government’s 2023 budget “will require you are moving in the direction of non-emitting generation.”
The Regulations also state that “tools”, including cash, from the federal government will be made “available to provinces and territories that take concrete action to achieve net-zero.”
In response, former Environment Minister and current clown-premier Scott Moe declared it all impossible and announced Saskatchewan would be completely ignoring, for the first time in its history, a federal mandate.
Yes, despite the fact that for almost twenty years SaskPower and the Sask Party had been planning on decommissioning two of its three coal power plants by 2029, equaling a shutdown of 8 of 9 coal-fired furnaces, Scooter would rather blow up the Canadian constitution and potentially put Saskatchewan at risk of being relegated back to a territory.
The cherry on the top of this clusterf**k sundae is all along, the Saskatchewan NDP Opposition have been in agreement and fully-supportive of the Sask Party’s position on everything from a carbon price to net-zero electricity by 2035.
With friends like that, why would the Sask Party need enemies
But wait, there’s good news!
According to SaskPower’s 2022-23 annual report, the company’s annual emissions decreased by 8.2 percent over 2021-22, which equals a whole 3 percent over 2005 levels (the target was a drop of 18 percent over 2005, but still, let’s take the win).
How did we manage such a thing?
Well, remember how we kinda, sorta but not really put unit 4 at Boundary Dam on standby for like five minutes at the end of December 2021?
“The year-over-year drop in emissions of 8.2 percentage points was primarily due to reductions in coal GHG emissions, with Boundary Dam Unit 4 taken offline in December 2021 and placed on standby to provide additional power only when needed…” - SaskPower’s 2022-23 annual report pg. 33
Yes friends, the one commitment Saskatchewan kept on coal, even briefly, demonstrably reduced our GHG emissions.
But not on Scott Moe’s watch. He’s not gonna let that happen.
I’m sure I’ve missed events or comments that should have been included in this piece, but it’s been a monumental effort putting together this timeline and I think you get the point. What a disgrace.
Have a great week watching Canada burn and America’s deserts flood.
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