Open for Corruption: Saskatchewan Is A Playground for Trading Schemes
In a province drowning in critical minerals, isolated from scrutiny, and ruled by a government blinded by cash and photo ops, the only thing scarcer than oversight is honesty.
Just a quick Friday note from me to tell you shit is going down and I’m getting ready to tell you about it.
I just don’t know how that’s going to look yet.
It’s too much for me to just publish here and hope for the best.
So I’m doing things I don’t normally do, including a much more aggressive pursuit of answers from the players. I’m talking to regulators, Together with an agency, we’re working to decide whether other media outlets, either in Canada or the US, should be involved.
Anyway, I know. I’m being super annoying. I wish I could say more. I want to publish it, but I can’t.
However I wanted to tell you it’s coming, in case something happens to me or this Substack.
Because like the rest of the world hurtling itself off a cliff, I genuinely believe that’s the end result I’m facing: it’ll be me or them, but not both.
I said during the 2024 writ period that Premier Scott Moe, if not more than a few Sask Party candidates, was running not just scared, but petrified.
The only thing I knew for sure was the fear in their eyes had nothing to do with the outcome at the ballot box and everything to do with either losing out on a cash windfall, or getting caught.
It was one or the other.
Probably both.
It still is.
Combined with recent events, what’s been brought to my attention more than ever in recent days and weeks is the stench of pure, wild-eyed terror emanating from the powerful circles that run this province.
So, I went back into the files I’d set aside to look again.
Clearly I was missing something.
Something big.
That’s how I’ve operated in recent years - I’ll start researching and writing something that begins to appears so corrupt, I don’t even want to know about it and put it away.
Because me knowing about it, or writing it, hasn’t helped. It’s arguably hurt me more than anything.
Even if I write a Government of Saskatchewan crime in detail and provide a smoking gun, nothing will happen. Local media won’t follow it, especially if it involves hard work, but mostly because they will never do anything to jeopardize the taxpayer-funded government advertising dollars paying their newsroom’s salaries.
The Saskatchewan NDP will pretend they didn’t see it, then triumphantly announce it as a byproduct of their own research in six months. It’s turned into a bit of a joke in my world.
Their communicatively-challenged fumblings will get nowhere with the issue and yet another layer of bullshit in Saskatchewan is hardened over as normal.
I’ve talked about some of this research - specifically into the Sask Party’s bizarre, post-pandemic fixation with India, as well as the sketchiness already infiltrating Saskatchewan’s burgeoning, lucrative critical minerals industry.
So I forced myself to go back and look again.
And very quickly, I found it.
I’m pretty sure I know what the scam is, or is going to be until 2028, when the Sask Party’s Titanic splits and its urban and rural halves spiral gently to their final resting places on the ocean floor
We’ll go on to observe the wreckage degenerating for decades, while building an identical ship, no doubt.
Probably with less life jackets, cause we’re so Saskasmart.
Saskatchewan is officially open for business: if that business is scamming investors.
Our province, rich in ingenuity and critical minerals but starved of oversight, is a petri dish for publicly-traded stock schemes.
And I believe the federal government knows they were blindsided by it too, but haven’t taken any steps to curb it.
Further, while I have no idea what he may have known or didn’t know, I suspect his inability to catch on to the truth was why Liberal MP and Saskatchewan-son Jonathan Wilkinson lost his Cabinet position.
Because to stupid people, fake “innovation” headlines and ribbon cuttings look just as good as real ones. Never forget that every single politician in Canada - I don’t care what level - clearly thinks you’re stupid if you live in Saskatchewan.
Saskatchewan’s underground is flush with lithium, uranium, potash, and copper, the very ingredients the world is desperate for in the decades-long sprint towards whatever the future holds.
Junior mining companies know this.
They flood investors with slick decks, dramatic press releases, and staged photos of ministers in hard hats. Often, these companies don’t mine much of anything; they mine hope.
I’ve been accused by pompous old men of not understanding how junior mining works. Don’t be one of those pompous old men, I’ll take your old ballz-face off.
In my very earliest solo consultancy years I worked with junior mining companies in Saskatchewan.
I’ve never been sexually harassed so hard by men who stand 5’9”* and under in my life.
*I’m 5’4” but the only thing worse than a mediocre Saskatchewan man is a short mediocre Saskatchewan man. Sorry Jeff.
But I digress.
Mining exploration - often labelled “junior” exploration when the company is new - is a legitimate and expensive step in the process of, as the name suggests, building a mine.
To get the expensive rocks out of the ground, you have to find them first. That costs money and smart, educated investors know that if they take that risk and invest at the exploratory level and that turns into a functional mine someday, they found a “unicorn”.
For example, BHP Billiton’s potash mine at Jansen was once a “unicorn”, founded by a Saskatchewan legend in the industry.
The fraud starts when these stocks are pumped up with bogus promises of jackpot deposits, or government supports, that aren’t necessarily legitimate.
As the price begins to peak on the news, or rumours of the news, company insiders, who know the rise has been manufactured, dump their own inflated stock on unsuspecting retail investors who are buying because they think they found a unicorn.
But what happens when the government itself is writing the news releases for these junior stocks?
What does it mean when it’s the premier and other various morally and ethically-stunted Cabinet Ministers and MLAs making the claims on behalf of publicly-traded companies?
Including in the Legislature?
Surely they wouldn’t do that, would they?
I mean, corrupt actors working in the Legislature - specifically the folks who determine which company is getting which made-up Sask Party mining credit, then who’s making that announcement - wouldn’t actually try to fuck around with the Toronto Stock Exchange, would they?
Cause boy oh boy, if they did, Saskatchewan would be perfect for this shit.
Isolated geography, tiny population, zero investigative media, and a regulatory system that barely exists.
The Financial and Consumer Affairs Authority, our so-called watchdog, couldn’t regulate a fucking bake sale. In reality, it serves as little more than an extension of economic cheerleading from the provincial government. As long as dollars are flowing and someone gets their photo op, nobody bothers to ask if investors are being played.
And make no mistake: they’re being played.
Corruption here doesn’t always look like bribes changing hands (though it also looks like that).
It looks like politicians desperately clinging to the illusion of growth, bending over backwards to showcase “innovation” while refusing to acknowledge that they are essentially laundering the credibility of our province out the door.
It looks like cabinet ministers posing with executives of publicly-traded companies in foreign countries whose business plans couldn’t withstand fifteen minutes of real due diligence.
It looks like people at the top pretending they don’t see patterns others across the globe are already flagging: Saskatchewan is an easy mark.
The risk is existential.
Saskatchewan’s economy is rooted in mining, and will be for generations.
There is no future for Saskatchewan where we don’t dig, process, and export massive amounts of natural resources.
Get that through your head, tree-huggers. Yes, renewable energy is on the table but so is everything under it for the foreseeable future.
Saskatchewan’s reputation in global markets should be one of our most valuable assets.
Allowing the province to become synonymous with scams and paper mines will haunt us for decades. Global capital is cautious, and once investors think you’re a jurisdiction riddled with fraud, you don’t get a second chance.
Just ask Ontario and Quebec about the Bre-X fallout.
I promise you, if things are allowed to continue the way they are right now, the next Bre-X will be in Saskatchewan. Chapell Roan will have done us the unique honour of introducing us to the world beforehand.
Do I need to draw y’all a picture? If you still don’t understand, bring me a crayon and some paper and we’ll walk through it together.
Grow up Saskatchewan, or you’re toast.
If Saskatchewan people don’t start demonstrating we even have the maturity, never mind capacity, to manage the pure, unadulterated, possibly-infinite first world wealth of resources under our feet, someone else - maybe, someone south of the 49th who’s demonstrated he doesn’t give a single fuck about the rules and desperately needs leverage over China - will just walk in and take them away from us.
It’s that simple.
If you don’t think it is, you’re not living in the same reality as the vast majority of North America.
I’m not even certain that would be a bad thing, at this point. We know the world is increasingly being viewed in economic blocks, and we live on one of those - a continent - before a country or a province.
The people in Saskatchewan equal 0.3% of this continent’s population.
We’re not winning anything, ever. We are at the mercy of everything around us, except for the leverage under our feet, which we refuse to manage like adults.
Meanwhile, the rest of Canada - including party’s of all stripes, none of which need a single vote from Saskatchewan, ever - routinely fails to acknowledge we even exist.
Stuff like this annoys the crap out of me.
How often do you see these lists and Saskatchewan isn’t even on them?
Like, come on Kirk. I don’t know who you are or if you’re Canadian, but Saskatchewan is bigger than Prince Edward Island, ffs.
Saskatchewan’s leaders love to boast that we are “Canada’s economic engine,” but here’s the truth: without real oversight, without tough regulators and a public that can distinguish between actual development and fraudulent schemes, we’re not an engine.
We’re a bunch of dumb pawns.
And every time Scott Moe, the Sask Party government and/or a private company uses Saskatchewan as a stage prop, our credibility bleeds a little more.
The real question is whether anyone in this province has the guts to admit how dangerously close Saskatchewan is to becoming a global laughingstock, and do something before it is.
I mean, besides me.
Someone, anyone, besides me.
Please?
Yeah I know.
If I last til then, it’s going to be me.
I’ll keep you posted. It’s going to be a few more weeks, at least, before I can tell you anything else on what specifically has been going on. Personally, I hope I’m not the one to tell you, but we’ll see.
In the meantime, if you’re tempted by a story of a new, exciting junior mining company being set up in the north, hawked by a bunch of well-heeled, somewhat high-profile Saskatchewan promoters, and you want to get in early while it’s still cheap?
Lol.
You do you, genius.
Have a good weekend,
The only way I am able to continue doing this work, which is incredibly labour-intensive, has been through your private donations. If you’d like to further support my work I accept e-transferred donations, gratefully, at tammyrobert0123@gmail.com