Revisiting the Saskatchewan Research Council Debacle
Even if you or your loved aren't health care or public education voters, let's not forget there are plenty of other examples of overt Sask Party mismanagement and incompetence to go round.
I’m not great with brevity.
The stories I tell are often complicated. Working alone, thoroughness is the best way I know how to protect my peace of mind, my reputation and more. If I’m not confident it’s factual and can’t prove that from multiple angles, I don’t write it.
Because unlike most media around here I am willing to name Saskatchewan names, including the unelected but powerful hands pulling the Sask Party’s strings. It’s taken hundreds of assholes to destroy the province, not just fifty or so elected Sask Party MLAs.
Ensuring what I share is true and comprehensive is critical to providing my readers with clarity, without promoting ideas that are false or could be interpreted as defamatory or libelous, etcetera etcetera.
It can be alot to digest at times, I appreciate.
I have noticed that my readership goes down over the summer and that’s totally understandable. We could all benefit from an increased effort to disengage from hellacious Saskatchewan politics.
It’s for those reasons and a few others that I’m again sharing the detailed work I published over the summer about the Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC), or as I call it, the Canary In the Coal Mine.
The SRC represents a microcosm of everything wrong with the Sask Party:
greed,
lying,
cronyism,
corruption,
mismanagement.
It was a four part feature; I encourage you to read it if you haven’t. The story is a stark, grim reminder of why the Sask Party’s power must preferably be eliminated, but at least greatly scaled back.
In honour of the whistleblowers who helped me write those stories, I’ve ensured they are free to everyone, with or without a subscription.
Please feel free to forward these stories anywhere you see fit. I’ve also summarized each one here.
In the first piece I detailed what constitutes criminal activity in a government:
The GTH story was provided to the Saskatchewan RCMP for investigation by former PC Party MLA and Cabinet Minister Rick Swenson, who took physical evidence, mainly documentation, into the depot and explained it to investigators like they were five.
When the victim is the public, any person can and should report suspicion of criminal activity in the government to law enforcement, keeping in mind Section 380 and Section 122 of the Criminal Code of Canada.
Section 380 is Fraud, which is a broad-based charge by design, but basically involves deliberately depriving someone or some group (including the public) of what belongs to them through deceit or misrepresentation.
Section 122 is Breach of Public Trust, a full mens rea, or “Guilty Mind” offence, meaning it has to include proof of a mental component, or that the accused possessed intention to commit a crime (like Fraud) plus advance knowledge of the circumstances.
Section 465(1)(c), Conspiracy to Commit a Crime, is also worth noting.
The second piece I wrote introduced the corruption at the SRC, which is overseen by the Minister responsible, Jeremy Harrison.
In summary:
Once a hallowed institution devoted to physical science, the SRC today claims it is a commercial enterprise with hundreds of millions of dollars in private sector clients; that’s bullshit; instead it’s positioning the recipients of hundreds of millions of Saskatchewan tax dollars through the SRC as “clients”.
The SRC board, once guided by some of the best scientific and academic minds in the country, is a hot mess of Harrison’s patronage appointments, firings and resignations, while the chair of the board is Harrison’s bestie (the esteemed mayor of St. Walburg, Saskatchewan); oh and he lies about it, on the record, all the time.
With the introduction of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) through the SRC, the Sask Party is once again gambling sick amounts of public money on unproven technology, just like it did with carbon capture, supposedly in the name of learning but really in the name of greed and fraud.
Part 3 gets into the nitty-gritty:
Since Mike Crabtree’s appointment as CEO of the SRC, morale has been at an all-time low; multiple skilled and experienced vice-presidents have been fired or pushed out along with other senior key employees.
In addition to his role as the $600,000-salaried CEO of SRC, Crabtree also owns or chairs “several” private resource-based companies.
After working with Jeremy Harrison’s office to procure SRC board member nominations, Crabtree welcomed two of his own business partners to the SRC’s board of directors; the three men did not disclose their connections to each other to SRC management or board of directors.
In early 2021, Meekins and those two business partners/SRC directors tried to quietly bankroll a multi-million dollar SRC project through their own venture capital firm - which would have rewarded them with gobs of money personally and showed zero no evidence of being in the best interests of the public.
Lastly:
By late 2021 the SRC board was only receiving information through Crabtree; many SRC vice-presidents had been fired or walked out and the remainder had been banned by Crabtree from presenting to the board, as they had done for years prior.
In December 2021, two internal SRC whistleblowers exposed Crabtree and his business partners on the board directors, along with their gross conflicts of interest, to SRC management and the board of directors.
The board of directors hired its own legal counsel and ordered an investigation; Jeremy Harrison’s office immediately shut it down and the two whistleblowers were fired.
The carnage continued through early 2022, with an incompetent, clueless and petulant Jeremy Harrison personally intervening and wreaking destruction on the SRC’s board, structure and operations; anything representing dissent was snuffed out and eradicated.
Crabtree and his two cronies remain inside the SRC, which today continues, under Jeremy Harrison’s management, to experiment in free market sectors with hundreds of millions of your tax dollars.
“The Saskatchewan Research Council is attempting to go head-to-head with China and prove the case for private investment in rare earth minerals by building North America’s first rare earths processing plant.” - ‘Saskatchewan faces major obstacles as it aims to compete with China in processing rare earth minerals’, Globe & Mail, October 2 2024
So begins a recent piece in the Globe & Mail detailing the odds stacked against the SRC on processing rare earth minerals, which has so far cost you at least a quarter of a billion tax dollars (you can find details on those numbers in the posts I linked above).
Because when the deal to borrow money for the SRC’s rare earth processing facility fell through thanks to internal conflicts of interest, Crabtree convinced Harrison to give him the money anyway.
Your money.
“The Chinese ruthlessly manipulate the (rare earths) market throughout the upstream, midstream and downstream, with the intention of suppressing development of the industry outside of China…”, explained SRC CEO Mike Crabtree in that Globe and Mail article.
“To such an extent that private investment here in North America takes one look at rare earths and goes, ‘Well, I can’t…””,
he continued.
But you can, Saskatchewan taxpayer.
Your tax dollars can and will keep funding the unfundable - projects the private sector would never spend a penny on - when the only fool standing between those projects and your money is Jeremy Harrison.
These are the same people who claim they can manage Saskatchewan’s multi-billion dollar nuclear file.
What I’ve learned in recent days that there are plenty of voters out there, particularly in Saskatoon, who aren’t health care or public education voters.
The SRC situation highlights the fact that rank mismanagement and incompetence extends well beyond those public services and into the realm of sectors of the economy the Sask Party has absolutely no business meddling in, nevermind with your tax dollars.
There is simply no good reason to return the Sask Party to outsized power over Saskatchewan.
But you know that.
Til then,
Media and newsrooms in Saskatchewan cannot and are not getting you the information you need to live in a healthy democracy. If you’d like to support my work, including 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. Thank you.