The Saskatchewan Research Council, Jeremy Harrison & Corruption (Part 2)
Time for sunlight. A lot of it.
In my last post, we reviewed the Canadian Criminal Code charges that are typically associated with crimes involving government, public or elected officials.
If you haven’t had a chance to read it, you should do so before diving in to this post, or any more in this series subsequently.
Jeremy Harrison, Corruption and Criminality
The purpose of the previous post was For Your Information — to understand the lens through which law enforcement investigates government officials.
For me, the takeaway was that while corruption must be a firing offence for any public official, it is not necessarily illegal.
In order to gain a conviction related to Fraud and/or Breach of Public Trust charges, the prosecution must be able to prove, without reasonable doubt, the accused’s intent. That’s not easy to do for Crown prosecutors on a good day. I can’t imagine what it would be like, now that Scott Moe’s office has turned obscuring literally everything the government does into an art form.
Today, in order to shine a light on issues that impact the public, that residents and voters have every right to know about, it needs to go to the police or witnesses need to come forward. In Saskatchewan, under the Sask Party, speaking out, or whistleblowing, has become a terrifying proposition that can result in significant personal loss. I certainly don’t judge anyone who walks away instead.
It shouldn’t have to come to this. There were once all kinds of Legislative and democratic mechanisms in Saskatchewan in place to mitigate and regulate the actions of public officials. Safeguards that protected both voters and elected officials.
We shouldn’t have to scour the Criminal Code looking for relief from the gross exploitation and abuse Scott Moe and his government are heaping on Saskatchewan people.
Thankfully, there is still courage out there.
With all that in mind, from here we’re going to proceed with some more background, this time on the Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC). The SRC has been the responsibility of Minister Jeremy Harrison since 2015.
Once a hallowed institution devoted to physical science, the SRC today has been reduced to nothing more than a funnel through which public dollars flow to private companies, with virtually non-existent public transparency or Opposition scrutiny.
Four the last four or five years, under the direction of CEO Mike Crabtree, the SRC has been promoting itself as a commercial enterprise, claiming to have hundreds of millions of dollars in private sector contracts and thousands of clients.
It is all patently false
That narrative has been contrived, in part to deflect from the fact that over a half a billion dollars, in recent years, has flown through the SRC directly into Saskatchewan’s oil patch.
Deflecting from the fact that there has been an alarming level of turnover in the organization since Mike Crabtree was promoted to CEO.
From the conflicts of interest that plague the SRC’s so-called executives today, yet there they are, taking home millions of dollars annually in publicly-funded salaries.
From the fact that Jeremy Harrison has personally manipulated the SRC’s board of directors to the point that it’s a joke. As you’ll see in the next post, the evidence on that one is overwhelming. It clearly highlights two facts: 1) Harrison has outright lied, on the record and 2) he is the definitive workplace bully, who terrorizes anyone and everyone who doesn’t capitulate immediately to his power.
Randy Weekes isn’t alone. Not even close.
Today, not a soul sits on the SRC board of directors anymore who has a background in science or engineering, but the chair likes to tell people he’s little Jake’s longtime buddy.
In fact, the current chair of the Saskatchewan Research Council’s board of directors, leading both the rare earth and nuclear files for the province, is not a nuclear physicist or a mining engineer.
It’s Jeremy’s friend, the mayor of St. Walburg, Saskatchewan.
Jeremy Harrison should have resigned or been fired a long time ago. The fact that lying, dysfunctional, greedy little narcissist still has a job is unbelievable and speaks volumes about Scott Moe’s failed leadership.
This is such bullshit.
“The SRC has been in business for over 75 years…” - Saskatchewan Research Council website
“….in business"?
What a bizarre thing to say about a research council, once known for its work in research.
In science.
In 2005, Saskatchewan’s Lt Governor, Lynda Haverstock, summed it up eloquently in the Speech she read from the Throne:
That, of course, all came to a screeching halt, exactly two years later.
By the dawn of the Sask Party’s second term in 2011, SRC president and CEO Dr Laurie Schramm was bragging, not about scientific breakthroughs, but that the SRC’s “revenues grew by over $15 million last year”. Schramm was a PhD chemist hired in 2001 from the Alberta Research Council. He was one of the few who survived the public service cull that took place after the Sask Party formed government.
One gets the sense that while Schramm may have initially toed the line, he still didn’t grasp the Sask Party’s singular focus on turning the SRC into a game reserve for venture capitalists, where the animals are stocked, not solicited.
Schramm finally retired. On April 1, 2019, Mike Crabtree, the SRC’s Vice-President of Energy, was promoted as its new President and CEO.
For the Sask Party government, Crabtree is the perfect public servant to usher up to the highest levels of unelected power: a current oilfield company executive with extensive experience in the private sector.
“Holding a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a master’s degree in petroleum engineering, Mike chairs several Canadian and US companies and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from government and private investors for successful new technology ventures.” - one of Mike Crabtrees current bios.
On May 2, 2019, Scott Moe’s cabinet ministers signed an order that also added Crabtree, the CEO, to the SRC’s independent board of directors — a first in the organization’s 75-year history.
The SRC is a crown agency governed by the Saskatchewan Research Council Act, 1978. Section 8 makes it clear that the buck stops with the minister responsible for the SRC.
The SRC is “responsible to the minister.”
From 2011 to 2015 that was Bill Boyd.
Since 2015 it has been Jeremy Harrison.
Bit of a red flag right there.
Section 10 of the Act states the purpose of the SRC:
“….and commercialization of”
It’s an “and”, not an “only” commercialization, but you’d never know it, given how the organization is talked up as a private sector powerhouse by Harrison and Crabtree, particularly since the latter’s installation as CEO.
In 2010-2011, the SRC’s revenue and expenses looked like this:
A modest $63-mil in revenue.
Despite the fact its financial report looks like it was generated in 1992, here’s the SRC’s revenue for 2021-22:
$276-million is a hell of a lot of revenue for a non-commercial Crown.
Unlike SaskPower, SaskTel etc., the SRC’s purpose is to enable industry in Saskatchewan, not be an industry in Saskatchewan.
In an opening message from management and the board in the SRC’s 2021-22 annual report, we learn it had been “a record-breaking year in terms of revenue”, due “in part” to the Accelerated Site Closure Program.
That doesn’t make sense. The Accelerated Site Closure Program (ASCP) is funded by the federal government.
Surely the SRC, which also routinely but vaguely makes reference to its “clients” in its promotions and reports, wouldn’t refer to federal tax dollars, aka public funding, as “record revenue”?
It would, as it turns out.
Here’s the SRC’s cash flow breakdown for 2021-22 in the report:
Buried deep in the financials is this little gem:
The SRC is a legislated entity. So are all of its “related parties”. This means all of the $195-million being promoted as “record revenue” in the SRC’s 2021-22 report is actually public funding.
This misrepresentation of the SRC’s funding feels deliberate and dishonest.
Unethical, at best.
In a 2019 Economy committee meeting, Harrison framed SRC funding this way:
“…as far as the overall budget of SRC, only about 28 per cent of SRC’s actual funding is from the provincial government. The rest comes from partnerships and from contracts with private industry…” - Jeremy Harrison, Saskatchewan Legislature, April 19, 2019
For fiscal year 2018-19 (which Harrison is referencing) the SRC reported a $20-million transfer from the GRF (you) and $51-million in contract revenue. According to Harrison, that contract revenue came from the SRC’s superduper-private-industry-partnerships-market-sector-partners-of-choice.
Except that’s not true. It didn’t come from the private sector.
In 2018-19, in addition to operating transfers, the Saskatchewan taxpayer, you, paid the SRC $35-million, or 70 per cent of the contract revenue Harrison said was coming from “private industry”.
That year, 77 per cent of the Saskatchewan Research Council’s overall revenue came from the public, not 28 per cent as Harrison claimed.
He’s either that stupid, or he’s a liar.
Or he’s both.
I’d be willing to bet the other 23 per cent of the SRC’s revenue that year was from federal government “contracts”.
I’m not even going to get into how all this money was being moved from the GRF to the SRC without any necessary approvals or legislative compliance.
The Sask Party doesn’t care what you or anyone else thinks, because they’re not here for you or anyone else.
The Saskatchewan Research Council, in recent years, has become an incredibly busy, expensive and important place.
In March we learned that the SRC would serve as the government’s primary organization responsible for micro-Small Modular Reactor (microreactor) development in the province. It would be the only organization authorized to hold regulatory licenses and be a licensed operator.
With that, SRC Nuclear Inc was born. It will be funded through an eye-watering $80-million from the provincial public purse, breathlessly announced by Jeremy Harrison last fall.
As if leading Saskatchewan’s nuclear file wasn’t enough, in August of 2020 Harrison announced $31-million in funding for the SRC to build a brand new Rare Earth Elements (REE) processing facility.
Why would a free market-loving government build a potato rare earth processing facility instead of private industry?
Who knows, but back in 2020 it was “expected to be fully operational in late 2022 with construction beginning (in 2020).” Nope.
In 2022, Harrison gave the SRC another $20-million for the facility, increasing the Saskatchewan taxpayers’ tab to $51-million.
Then at a 2024 media event to announce a few more million of your federal dollars being thrown at rare earth elements, Harrison tacked $20-million on to the province’s total. At that event he casually stated that with an "initial $71 million investment from the Government of Saskatchewan, SRC continues to break new ground in the rare earth space…”
Again, the initial investment from the Government of Saskatchewan was $31-million, but if Jeremy Harrison’s mouth is moving, he’s lying (there will be more on this $31-million in a minute).
Meanwhile on its About page, the SRC boasts hundreds of millions of dollars in “annual revenue” and a whopping 1600 clients from all over the world.
According to the SRC’s 2022-23 Annual Report, revenue from related (AKA publicly-funded) parties was $176-million. That means 75 per cent of the $232-million in “revenue” boasted by the SRC that year was from public funding.
We’ve established, unequivocally, that the vast majority of its “revenue” is coming from the public purse, so who the heck are the SRC’s 1600 “clients”?
My theory is these clowns are referring to the recipients of your hundreds of millions of your tax dollars as “clients”. Thousands of private oilfield companies hired by the SRC to clean up those abandoned oil wells.
To work for and be paid by you, represented by the government and people you elect to handle these things.
The simpering audacity of doling out public funding to oilfield companies to do a job, then calling those companies “clients” of the Crown, is unreal.
You can see the list of those companies for yourself if you download the document at this link, open it, scroll down to “Saskatchewan Research Council” and download the document at that link. I encourage you to do so and get a better look at how much of your money is hemorrhaging, from this particular gaping wound in the public purse, into Saskatchewan’s oil patch:
It’s wild.
Once upon a time things were so much simpler.
You’d have a functional if not bland, scientific SRC website. There you’d see the Government of Canada’s logo beside the Government of Saskatchewan’s, together with an explanation that the oil cleanup initiative was a jointly-funded and administered federal and provincial program.
Instead, today all we’re getting is an overt effort by Jeremy Harrison and CEO Mike Crabtree to obscure SRC operations, projecting an inaccurate portrayal of its funding, its mandate and how it operates.
Meanwhile, its CEO has dug out talking points from the days Brad Wall was proudly dumping $2-billion of your money into unproven, still-ineffective carbon capture and storage:
“The fundamental piece is to catalyze the development of a hub here in Saskatchewan. To provide the expertise, the experience, the intellectual property… the future of this plant will be in continuing to demonstrate and support the development of the hub, a sort of research through commercialization, looking at new technologies.” - Mike Crabtree, Electric Autonomy, July 10, 2023
That word salad should send a chill down your spine. The Saskatchewan government is once again gambling staggering amounts of public money on unproven technology, supposedly in the name of learning.
Where have we heard this crap before?
Billions of dollars down the drain.
Did I mention China is involved?
Cost overruns
… combined with unelected officials running rampant with public dollars in the private sector — what could possibly go wrong?
Alot.
In my next post, you’ll find out.
You’ll find out what prompted one of the fired SRC whistleblowers (there’s more than one) to write, in an email to dated January of 2022, before Harrison bumped the province’s contribution up from $31-million to $51-million, then $71-million:
Or this, from a different email, regarding the same rare earth elements facility:
This is the very tippy-tip of the iceberg. I’ve never seen anything like this.
What I’m going to lay out for you in the next post is absolutely disturbing.
Til then,
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Thank you.