Sask Party Insiders Pt 7: Sask Party's 2022 Fiscal Return - The Revenue
It's a well-heeled, money-grubbing monstrosity.
As you saw in the previous piece, the Sask Party could complete this form with a crayon and Saskatchewan’s Chief Electoral Used Dental Floss Michael Boda would accept it.
We have to work with what we’ve got, so here’s how the Sask Party’s 2022 revenue, or “Contributions” sheet was submitted:
“Unincorporated Organizations or Associations” accounts for revenue transfers to the party from the Sask Party’s constituency associations.
“Proceeds from Other Sources”, according to the form’s instructions, should be where the Sask Party records the proceeds of its premier’s dinners and copious other fundraisers, but does not. Because again, who’s going to do anything about it?
Not Elections Saskatchewan.
Trade Unions
I guess these folks really enjoyed the abuse they took during the pandemic, especially when the shit hit the fan in late 2020.
Regina firefighters must have loved being forced into unprepared, understaffed and often for-profit senior care homes full of dead bodies.
Forgive me for no longer having a ton of sympathy for Saskatoon paramedics who complain about having to sit in the hallway or parking lot at RUH for hours, even days, because the Sask Party has destroyed health care and their careers.
I mean, if something wasn’t working for them, why else would firefighters and paramedics actually pay the Sask Party to do this to them?
It’s bizarre and makes no sense at all.
Corporations
A numbered company is simply a corporation that has been assigned a sequential number by Information Services Corp (ISC) Corporate Registry and then has “Saskatchewan Ltd.” tacked on to the end.
Most numbered companies are holding companies. This is what that looks like on a corporate registry form:
Most people don’t have numbered companies for nefarious reasons or so they can make anonymous political donations.
That said, there is a legitimate interest in numbered companies due to the general lack of transparency when they show up on political donor rolls. With that in mind, here’s the list of numbered companies, along with the people and industries behind them, who donated to the Sask Party in 2022.
I don’t get too concerned over numbered companies, because most corporate names, whether descriptive or numbered, don’t reveal a company’s ownership structure anyway. You have to spend the money with ISC to figure out it either way.
Occasionally though, the ISC corporate registry document will provide a bit more of a description. For example, this is one of Sask Party MLA Don Morgan’s many numbered companies:
You’ll note that Don Morgan launched his real estate development corporation, which he shares with his wife Sandy, in December 2009 - six years after he became a MLA and two years after he was made a Sask Party Cabinet Minister, which he’s been for all fourteen years since.
Imagine learning that a United States senator built a personal real estate empire, in the same state he was elected, during the twenty years he held office.
What would you think?
Exactly.
Don Morgan actually has a bunch of numbered companies, including one that holds his hotels, but we’ll have to look at his bullshit on another day.
For now, you should know:
That’s right.
Of the 566 non-profit and profit corporations that donated funds to the Sask Party in 2022, a whopping 141, or a quarter of those donors enjoyed taxpayer-funded revenue, by way of a government contract or grant, in the fiscal year of 2021-22.
Those 141 corporations raked in $400-mil of your taxpayer dollars that year.
Of the types of corporations that donated to the Sask Party in 2022, the construction and agriculture industries come out on top
Remember this next time you’re wondering why the Sask Party is obsessed with constructing useless buildings while refusing to staff or run the service inside properly.
There are almost twice as many donors from the construction, trades and agriculture industries as there are from the rest. Combined, the ag and construction industries make up a quarter of the Sask Party’s corporate donor pool in 2022.
Corporations dealing in energy (predominantly oil, natch) and/or Saskatchewan’s natural resources donated the highest average amount to the Sask Party, approximately $3000 each. They make up about 6% of the Sask Party’s 2022 corporate donor roll and account for over 10% of the party’s corporate revenue for that year.
At least half of those natural resource-related corporations are headquartered in other provinces but pay the Sask Party for the privilege of pillaging Saskatchewan.
This includes Sask Party insider Grant Kook’s Whitecap Resources, headquartered in Calgary, which donated $5980 to the Sask Party in 2022. Whitecap Resources proudly boasts former Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall as a member of its board of directors.
You saw this one in my previous post, but here it is again.
I would love to tell you how much top overall donor Rawlco Radio (those amounts also include donations from corporate owners as individuals, as well as from their other holdings, affiliates and numbered companies) took in from the Sask Party government over the fiscal year of 2021-22.
I can’t, because the amount of your tax dollars spent on Rawlco Radio by the Sask Party is being deliberately withheld.
Going back years, I can’t find a single dollar paid to Rawlco Radio in the records of any government entity. In fact, I can’t find a government payment to any mainstream Saskatchewan media outlet, including television networks and newspapers.
One can’t turn on a Rawlco Radio station without hearing full-blown Sask Party propaganda being spewed by their on-air personalities or in their ad rotations. No matter what media outlet is carrying it, Saskatchewan government advertising is all deeply political, yet presented under the guise of communication from a publicly-funded Government of Saskatchewan service, agency or Crown corporation.
Rawlco Radio’s overt promotion of political propaganda, its geriatric AM radio star’s deep, well-known ties to the inner workings of the Sask Party, combined with the fact Rawlco owners are some of its top funders puts us in dangerous, unethical and authoritarian media territory.
While no payments were made directly to media outlets, $5.7-million was paid through Crown corporations and the Government of Saskatchewan to Phoenix Advertising Group in 2021-22. As you saw in the previous post, Phoenix Advertising is the Sask Party’s political ad agency of record.
Another $4.8-million in public money went to Brown Communications, owned by Ken Christoffel. Notably, $1.7-million of Brown’s $4.8-million was spent via the Ministry of Health, while nothing was spent on advertising through the SHA.
All this suggests to me that Sask Party government has instructed Ministries, Crowns and other public agencies to purchase advertising through third parties instead of media outlets directly. Further, messaging for crucial public services like the SHA is now being overseen by Paul Merriman because it’s created by the political arm, the Ministry of Health, of the provincial government.
There’s a fine line between a governing political party’s advertising and government communication with its residents, but in Saskatchewan that line is non-existent.
There’s no way your tax dollars should be paying to promote Scott Moe’s rambling, unhinged political musings, yet here we are.
The Sask Party knows this full well. They lost their everloving minds in spring 2003, when not long before that year’s provincial election was called, the Saskatchewan NDP government launched an ad campaign called “The Future is Wide Open”.
Today the campaign is the Saskatchewan First Act, which is not even questionably political. The Sask Party doesn’t care because the Sask Party believes it is Saskatchewan.
The Sask Party’s crusade against the federal government and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is also undeniably political, yet the Government of Saskatchewan’s ad campaigns and Scott Moe’s social media accounts, which are run by public servants, are all over it.
With the Government of Saskatchewan’s logo front and centre.
It’s just so wrong and while any one of these issues would have been a scandal in previous governments, nobody even notices in 2023.
You should know how much is being spent on government advertising, because if even half of the $10.5-million spent through Phoenix and Brown in 2021-22 went to Saskatchewan media outlets, the Sask Party is still the biggest client for mainstream media advertising sales in the province.
You better believe that impacts what you get for news from that media. I saw it when I worked in a newsroom and have witnessed it in virtually every other newsroom in Saskatchewan. Mainstream media is on its last legs because its ad revenue is in the toilet. There is an understanding between sales managers and newsrooms that editorial strings are attached to Sask Party government spending and if everyone wants to keep getting paid, those strings are not to be f**ked with.
One last thought.
Four Rural Municipalities, which are listed as corporate donors, used tax dollars to buy their elected officials into Sask Party fundraisers.
Weirdly, three of the four RMs basically border each other.
The red number is the amount of provincial funding these RMs received in 2021-22.
I’m sure the fact that the reeve of the RM of Prince Albert is running for a Sask Party nomination in Saskatchewan Rivers is unrelated to the RM’s choice to donate to the Sask Party, right?
The fourth was the RM of Corman Park, which received $2.8-million in 2021-22.
TLDR:
The biggest cohort of Sask Party donors in 2022, by a lot, is the cohort that received tax dollars the year before.
The Sask Party owns the mainstream media in Saskatchewan, which is why you don’t get information like mine from the province’s mainstream media and you never will.
Bonus graphic, cause this one made me laugh out loud.
I’m still laughing.
Individuals
The entire point of this series is to look at individuals who are influencing the Sask Party, not individuals who simply donate to the Sask Party or any political party. There is nothing inherently wrong with citizens participating in democracy, however there are, of course, abuses of the privilege all over the Sask Party’s donor rolls.
I can tell you that the top individual donor, by country mile, was a man named Robert Forbes, with a $15,400 donation to the Sask Party. I suspect Robert, alongside his brothers Mark and Earl, is one of the founding owners of the Forbes Group of Companies, which is a direct competitor of Hundseth Power Line Construction.
As you saw above, Hundseth, owned by the Hundseth family, was the Sask Party’s fourth top corporate donor at $15,060.
After Forbes, the next highest individual donors come in at around $5000 each, including two of the Semples (Brandt Industries) and a Saskatchewan man named Glen Dow. All will feature in upcoming Insiders posts. I can tell you now, however, that $5000 is pretty shabby for Glen Dow, who has a bit of a checkered history, often donates five figures in a year and has personally donated almost $100,000 to the Sask Party over the last ten years.
Dow is also the reeve of the RM of Wilton and has been since at least 2011.
What I found also notable is while the majority of the Sask Party caucus coughed up cash for their overlords, ten of the Sask Party’s forty-five MLAs did not donate a portion of their taxpayer-funded salary to the Sask Party: Domotar, Francis, Lawrence, Lambert, Fiaz, Marit, Steele, Bonk, Goudy and Merriman.
Did they not get the tithing memo? Sask Party MLAs have dutifully been tithing back to their party every year, for years.
Finally, some historical context.
Interestingly, the number of corporations donating to the Sask Party has been marginally dropping after each Saskatchewan election cycle.
The increase in individual donations in 2017 is predominantly made of up of anonymous cash donors who paid less than $250 each. For the year after an election, that spike in anonymous is suspicious as hell, but I can’t explain it.
With the exception of the totally corrupt, illegal every else in the developed world election-year cash injections (which have also been dropping a bit), the Sask Party’s cash revenue has stayed relatively level over the last fifteen years.
You’d think, even just based on inflation, it would have increased.
Doesn’t matter though, because the Sask Party ended 2022 with $1.7-million cash on hand. They also own real estate and hold an unknown amount of cash investments, but we don’t get to know about any of that because the overstuffed clown car that is Elections Saskatchewan doesn’t require a political party list its assets.
I apologize for not having this piece out to you sooner. There’s just no way to properly convey how much work this research is to complete, filter and then attempt to present in a way that will keep me out of trouble, yet will have as much impact as possible.
Because Saskatchewan voters need to know this information.
That’s just Democracy 101.
But as I’ve told you so many times, you’re not getting it from Saskatchewan media outlets, for reasons including what I’ve laid out in this post.
I don’t love doing this, but independent media is the future of information and they all, including Canadaland, regularly make similar funding appeals, so I’m going to continue doing the same.
Researching and writing this series is both expensive and soul-destroying.
Expensive because the number of documents I have to purchase to chase down and verify the information on who’s who and what’s what is unbelievable.
Soul-destroying because corruption in Saskatchewan politics is rampant and I am the only one who can be bothered to tell you about it.
At this point I have been trying tell you about the Sask Party’s corruption for almost a decade. As many of you know, that has often been to my own personal detriment. I remain a ongoing and constant target of Sask Party operatives even today.
Voters must know this information. I’m not going to tell anyone how to vote, but I’m going to do my best to arm as many people as possible with the facts before they choose to tick a box.
Because this cannot continue.
It is not sustainable.
You will wake up one morning, sooner than you think, to discover Saskatchewan you know and love is gone. Whether into third-party management by the federal government, or because the Sask Party and Scott Moe have irreparably destroyed vital public services and even our province’s seat in Canada.
Danielle Smith’s win in Alberta has emboldened them even further.
I work alone. I support myself and my kids from the subscription revenue from this Substack. My subscription revenue is growing but it’ll be a while yet before I’m confident this is a sustainable venture for me.
I literally left the country, nevermind the Saskatchewan I love and miss so dearly, to live cheaper and more peacefully, without targeted harassment in my day-to-day life. I did so because I want to keep doing this for as long as I can. 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 a modest donation to tammyrobert0123@gmail.com.
Please also share this information far and wide. Encourage your family and friends to subscribe.
Again, I’m not telling anyone how to feel about this information, but I am telling you more people need to know this information.
I am so grateful for you all. I have the best audience in the world. Thank you so much again for your readership, subscriptions and support, whether through your patronage, your donations or your kind words. All three keep me going.
