The Sask Party Gutted the Human Rights Commission & Replaced it With Partisan Hacks

Saskatchewan continues spiralling into a new, frightening reality. What's it going to take for residents to notice?

Heather Kuttai was the canary in the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission (SHRC) coal mine.

"I cannot tell you the depth of my disappointment in the government I have worked for and supported for the last nine years,” she said in the October 2023 letter in which she resigned from her position on the SHRC.

At issue was the Sask Party’s now infamous “pronoun policy”, a “law” passed by the Sask Party government that deliberately and aggressively strips the nationally-protected rights of certain Saskatchewan people.

At the time, the SHRC, by way of it’s interim chief Barry Wilcox, supported Kuttai and her decision, calling the Sask Party’s use of the notwithstanding clause to override sections of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code “disappointing.”

In Saskatchewan, that kind of mild, arguably-insufficient public dissent of the Sask Party government does not stand… even from their own adherents. Kuttai was a well-known Sask Party fangirl, at least in its early years. Barry Wilcox donated $6375 to the Sask Party between 2016 and 2020.

Think about that.

The best response our Human Rights Commission could come up with to a government creating an unprecedented, tyrannical law stripping people of their legally-protected rights, was “disappointing”.

Pathetic, politically-motivated, inadequate … yet last week the Sask Party still did what everyone knew it would do in retaliation: fired everyone on the SHRC and replaced them with even more political, more biased and more controllable partisans.

Let’s have a look at who these people are and what qualifies them to serve as your human rights defenders in the Sask Party’s dream empire of Saskatchewanistan.