First, let’s define Grant Kook’s Golden Opportunities (GO):
In other words, it’s an investment pool.
You’ll note above that the words “Labour-sponsored” are used, which differs from how Golden Opportunities describes itself on its more visible “About” page:
In reality, whether they use the word Labour or Retail, all it means is that in order for the fund and its investors to qualify for the tax credit, the fund needs to be sponsored by a union. GO is sponsored by the Construction and General Workers Union Local 180, which is why Lorraine Sali is on its board.
More on her in a future post.
Westcap is Kook’s venture capital firm. It is listed as the fund manager for Golden Opportunities.
According to this incredibly simplistic brochure,
“Our diversified client base worldwide includes institutions, retail investors, governments and high-net-worth individuals.” - Westcapmgt.ca
There is overlap between the companies invested in Golden Opportunities and Westcap’s MBO funds. I don’t know how it works and I don’t care, because it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that when those investments flourish, a very elite group of Sask Party insiders, including MLAs, make a bunch of money. Nothing wrong with that. Bunches of money are fabulous, if you’ve earned them and are not an elected official.
The extent to which this fund has been intertwined with the Sask Party, including through the Government of Saskatchewan is shocking.
Consider Golden Opportunities board of directors:
In addition to being the chair of GO, Brian Barber, who donated $2000 personally to the Sask Party between 2016 and 2021, is also the chair of the Saskatchewan government’s 3sHealth agency. Golden Opportunities owns interests in a number of companies connected to the Saskatchewan health care system. Barber has sat on the 3s board for over a decade. So did Grant Kook, up until recently.
Barber is a member of the Saskatchewan Labour Board, which is an interesting gig for a man who also chairs a Labour fund. He is an executive with Alberta-based Ledcor Construction, which donated $108,000 to the Sask Party between 2016 and 2021.
Murad Al-Katib is going to be his own Insider post, but for now he is president and CEO of AGT Food and Ingredients Inc and has donated $2900 personally to the Sask Party from 2016 to 2021. Mobil Capital ($1500 donation to the Sask Party in 2016), Al-Katib Consulting and Long Lake Investments Group (which owns Chuka Creek Business Park east of Regina, aka the final nail in the GTH coffin) are also Katib’s.
Blair Davidson is an accountant and director of The Des Nedhe Group of Companies, which has donated $9720 to the Sask Party between 2016 to 2021.
Ron Waldman donated $940 to Sask Party between 2016 and 2021. He is a director and shareholder of Cavalier Enterprises (donations to Sask Party from 2016 to 2021: $20,000) and a board member of Great Western Brewing Company Limited (donations to Sask Party from 2016 to 2021: $48,942).
Catherine Gryba is a former board director of eHealth and a current director of the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency.
Ken Juba is a founding partner in Sask Party advertising agency Creative Fire (donations to Sask Party 2016 - 2021: $11,810).
So yeah, you could say Golden Opportunities board of directors is rather connected to the Sask Party and the Government of Saskatchewan.
Now let’s look at the private companies into which Westcap invests, whether through its MBO funds or through Golden Opportunities.
Here’s a list of Golden Opportunities’ holdings as per its 2022 Annual Report:
Jump.ca
This one has always blown my mind.
When the Sask Party was elected, they immediately cancelled the board of directors of SaskTel appointed under the previous NDP government. One month later and a mere three months after the Sask Party formed government, in February 2007, Grant Kook was appointed chairman of SaskTel by Brad Wall, who was and remains today a close personal friend and now-business associate of Kook’s.
The year before Kook was appointed chairman of SaskTel, in 2006, Westcap completed a management buyout and expansion of jump.ca. Today jump.ca holds nineteen SaskTel retail locations across Saskatchewan, the most of any SaskTel service provider.
This means the chairman of SaskTel, who the Sask Party has kept in that role for over fifteen years, is also an owner of the most SaskTel-authorized retail stores in SaskTel’s market.
“If you’ve been waiting for the latest smartphone or related tech, this is the place to find it,” boasts an April 2017 media release on Golden Opportunities website, which refers to Jump as a “proudly Saskatchewan company”.
Really?
Cause over three-quarters of jump.ca is owned by BC companies. Golden Opportunities owns 20 percent. A guy named Kelly Kazakoff owns a minority share in jump.ca as one of the founders of the company.
Kazakoff is also a co-founder of iQmetrix, which today operates as Chrysalis.
Chrysalis
Chrysalis is described as an “ecosystem of networked companies”:
iQmetrix Wireless, which operates “in the telecom retail industry”. How convenient for the chairman of a telecom.
Ready, a “dining platform for restaurants, stadiums, and hotels”.
Shiftlab, a “performance-based scheduling platform designed for retailers…to maximize performance and employee engagement while reducing labour costs.”
Maybe Lorraine Sellout Sali would like to weigh in on that last one, which sounds like a real win for workers… but I doubt it.
SaskTel, with Grant Kook as chair, has been doing business with iQmetrix since at least 2011. Since that year SaskTel has spent at least $2-million with the company.
In 2020 iQmetrix announced a multi-million partnership with SLGA to sell technology for the retail stores that the Sask Party sold about a year later.
GO and Westcap announced an investment in Chrysalis Software Inc (formerly iQmetrix Global Ltd.) in August of 2022.
Terra Grain Fuels
I’m going to struggle to explain this monster, but I’ll do my best.
Golden Opportunities became a 17% shareholder in Terra Grain Fuels (TGF) in 2006, when TGF was constructing a 150-million litre ethanol facility near Belle Plaine, Saskatchewan. TGF claimed it would be “the largest wheat-based ethanol production facility in Canada”.
Also in 2006, the Government of Saskatchewan, through the Crown Investments Corporation, invested $30-million in TGF. In 2008, SaskWater built a booster station at Buffalo Pound to feed the ethanol production facility its water supply.
In 2006, after Golden Opportunities invested, the majority of the remaining TGF shares (did I mention that Sask Party darling, mega-donor and insider E. Craig Lothian was a founding TGF shareholder?) were owned by a company called Just Energy, which was founded in 2002 by former Enron executives.
What could possibly go wrong?
Surprise!
By 2013 Just Energy was plagued by accusations from all over North America of misleading business practices and fraud lawsuits. That same year Just Energy sold TGF off to a “group of Saskatchewan businesses”.
The buyer was a numbered company (101247441 Sask Ltd) of which Golden Opportunities owns 42%.
The other 58% is held by PFM Capital (donations to the Sask Party from 2016 to 2021: $18,500) which is owned by Randy Beattie (donations to the Sask Party from 2016 to 2021: $3400) and Rob Duguid.
I’m not going to get into the economics of ethanol fuel production because I don’t care. Let’s just say they’re not great. Despite that, in May of 2019, Federated Co-op Ltd purchased Terra Grain Fuels.
To facilitate that sale, the Sask Party government gave TGF another $3.5-mil “to sustain operations through a sales process”. Then in 2019 CIC, under the direction of then Minister Joe Hargrave, wrote off the $40-million TGF owed you, the Saskatchewan taxpayer in unpaid principal and accumulated interest.
Don’t worry though, we got the $3.5-mil back.
Maybe that’s thanks to the lobbyist firm retained by Federated Coop Ltd, Prairie Sky Strategies, home to more than a few Sask Party elitists, including but not limited to:
In October of 2021, FCL signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Whitecap Resources, another Golden Opportunities investment acquired when Whitecap Resources bought out Golden Opportunities shares in TORC O&G in 2020.
The MOU suggests that FCL will capture CO2 at its refinery in Regina and the former Terra Grain Fuels, now Co-op Ethanol Complex near Belle Plaine, Saskatchewan, which would then be compressed, transported to and sequestered by Whitecap Resources at its Weyburn carbon capture facility for use in the oil patch.
Apparently nobody at TGF, including Grant Kook or Randy Beattie, thought about doing this deal when it owned the facility.
You may remember the Weyburn unit from that time Brad Wall’s government entered into a money-losing contract with Cenovus to sell them C02 sequestered by SaskPower to use in it.
You, the taxpayer, ended up paying Cenovus millions of dollars in penalties because the contract terms weren’t met.
In late 2017, Whitecap Resources bought the Weyburn unit from Cenovus.
On July 30, 2019, former Saskatchewan premier and carbon capture champion Brad Wall became a director and shareholder of Whitecap Resources. Two days later he was all over the media shilling for them, singing their carbon capture praises.
In the fiscal year of 2019-20, SaskPower - you, the ratepayer - paid Whitecap Resources, including brand new shareholder and director Brad Wall, $11-million in carbon capture penalties.
$3.7-million in 2020-21.
$6-million in 2021-22.
You’re welcome Brad.
That’s the tip of the iceberg. There will be an entire post on Whitecap Resources - including which current Sask Party MLA is literally on Whitecap Resources payroll - coming in future days.
WBM Technologies
WBM Technologies (WBM), formerly Western Business Machines, has been around Saskatchewan forever. And really, kudos to them for successfully surviving what was essentially the elimination of “Business Machines” from most businesses.
You may also remember WBM from that time in 2018 when they were offering all-expenses paid trips to public servants who were procuring the company’s services with public dollars.
In the last ten years, WBM has enjoyed $150-million in government contracts.
That number does not include contracts with the former health regions, or the current. The Sask Health Authority (SHA) has spent over $10-million with WBM since its inception in 2018, including $4.7-million in the first year, when Grant Kook presided over SHA as vice-president.
WBM also does business with Crop Insurance Corporation, the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency, eHealth and I’m sure many more. In fact, I’d venture the number of public dollars WBM has raked in over the past ten years is closer to a quarter of a billion dollars.
There was a sharp spending spike with WBM at SaskPower, SaskTel and across the Government of Saskatchewan (the Ministries) in 2019-20.
Why? Who knows.
In 2019 critic Danielle Chartier tried to ask about a WBM contract. As per usual, she got a dishonest, disrespectful and undemocratic answer from both the Crown official and then-Minister Bronwyn Eyre.
“A year from now.”
Fred Bradshaw is an idiot of epic proportions, but that is a stupid answer that disrespects you, Saskatchewan taxpayer, not Danielle Chartier.
And the info was never provided.
In October of 2022 Westcap announced that it had made a “significant investment” in WBM “in syndication with Westcap managed funds, Golden Opportunities Fund Inc…. and Westcap MBO III Investment LP…”
Today WBM is owned 33% by CEO JoeAnne Hardy, 33% by Brett Bailey and 33% by Golden Opportunities/Westcap MBO III.
Three months later after Westcap and GO’s investment in WBM, in January 2023, a memo went out to all Government of Saskatchewan employees.
“As we shared with you in 2021, the Government of Saskatchewan entered into a managed print agreement with WBM Technologies.” - Managed Print Agreement Key Messages/Q&A – January 2023, Govt of Saskatchewan
How convenient.
How was a sole-sourced, lucrative government contract awarded to WBM without a tender or seemingly any transparent public process? According to the same document:
“The Government of Saskatchewan leveraged the competition completed by SaskPower in a former tender by that organization for a managed print service.” Managed Print Agreement Key Messages/Q&A – January 2023, Govt of Saskatchewan
The only tender I could find was from 2016.
That’s how the Sask Party government does business now? A company wins an unrelated Crown tender five years ago and becomes a sole-sourced supplier for Saskatchewan’s entire public service… forever?
Sweet deal.
Sounds like a golden opportunity for a small, very fortunate group of Saskatchewan shareholders, doesn’t it.
This is not even remotely close to a fulsome breakdown of the sheer volume of interests held by Westcap and Golden Opportunities that overlap with public agencies, public money and god knows what else.
There will be at least two more posts on Kook to come.
By the way, Grant Kook was recently appointed to sit on the University of Saskatchewan’s Land Trust board of directors.
He also sits on the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation’s Investments Committee.
Let’s also remember this isn’t about Grant Kook, Doug Emsley or anyone else at all.
It’s about the Sask Party government and the fact they’ve stoked this kind of environment, determined for it to flourish while they make personal gains. It’s about Brad Wall throwing his entire tenure as premier into question by the way he’s opted to handle himself since.
Meanwhile, you continue to suffer under an authoritarian government; accessing gutted, useless public services like health care and K-12 education and a fraudulent, politically-manipulated economy not meant for the participation of the likes of you or me.
There has to be consequences at the ballot box, Saskatchewan.
Stand up and do it for yourselves, for heaven’s sake. You deserve so much more, including respect, than you’re getting.
The provincial economy is becoming more and more nationalized every day, rigged entirely in the favour of an elite, wealthy few who fully bankroll useless marionettes like Scott Moe and other Sask Party clowns. The amount of power consolidated in the hands of just a few men in Saskatchewan is staggering. Scott Moe and the Sask Party caucus have turned the Saskatchewan government into an archaic, abusive Punch and Judy Show.
Your Saskatchewan-based business will never succeed if it in any way poses a threat to, or needs to compete with a Sask Party Insider's interests.
It just won’t happen.
There’s so much more on all of this to come, including how what you just read is connected to other Sask Party donors and insiders like Greg Yuel, who is also invested in the companies I’ve just written about.
It just never ends.
I don’t love doing this, but I’m seeing more and more independent media making similar funding appeals, so I’m going to continue doing the same.
Researching and writing this series is proving both expensive and soul-destroying. Corruption in Saskatchewan is rampant and I am the only one even bothering to tell you about it.
At this point I have been trying tell you about the Sask Party’s corruption for almost a decade which as you know, was often to my own personal detriment. I remain a target of Sask Party operatives today.
Yet, you need to know this information in order to try to turn this dumpster fire around. To get our Saskatchewan back.
Because this cannot continue.
It is not sustainable.
Unless somebody, somewhere, does something, you will wake up one morning and realize the Saskatchewan you know and love is gone, whether into third-party management by the federal government or because the Sask Party has irreparably destroyed our place in Canada.
I work alone. I support myself and my kids from the subscription revenue from this Substack. I want to keep doing this for as long as I can, but it’s not easy. If you would like to chip in a few bucks to help cover my costs so I can keep more of this coming for you, you can etransfer me at tammyrobert0123@gmail.com.
Please also share this information far and wide. I’m not telling anyone how to feel about it, but I am telling you more people need to know about it.
Thank you so much to all of you again for your readership, subscriptions and support. I am so grateful - I have the best audience in Canada.
Watch for more on Golden Opportunities and Westcap, hopefully by the end of this week.
