We Deserve Just Bins

A garbage company ran by Regina resident Adam Snook is one of the province's most popular "news" outlets. We let that happen. That’s literally the only Just Bins' story that will ever matter.

Saskatchewan Roughrider Jayden Dalke, linebacker and team captain, died in a car crash Saturday evening on the highway between Lumsden and Regina.

He was just 30 years old.

The team announced his death in a statement Sunday afternoon.

Another story broke Sunday afternoon, that of a collision between two vehicles, on the highway between Lumsden and Regina, in which two people died.

“They found one vehicle in the centre median and another in the southbound ditch, according to a Sunday news release.” - CBC.ca

So that’s what we know about the facts today.

This is where Just Bins comes into play.

First, let me start by issuing a hearty “you’re welcome” to Adam Snook for giving his company exposure, because I’m quite certain that vast swaths of my audience will have never heard of it.

It’s a trade-off I considered before writing. I’m fine with it. The old saying “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” is 100 percent not a thing anymore and anyone who thinks it is… well, probably also believes Just Bins is edgy and important.

Let me tell you what Just Bins actually is, so we’re not confused about what we’re talking about, because I’m not going to go as far as linking to his platforms.

Just Bins Waste Disposal is, as the name might suggest, a garbage bin rental company in Regina. Six, twelve, and twenty-four cubic yard dumpsters. Regina man Adam Snook founded the company in 2009, handed it off to a friend, moved to Alberta to chase oil money, came back when the oil money dried up, and re-purchased Just Bins in 2018ish.

The man runs a garbage company, not a news company, which is why this is possibly the worst location on the Las Vegas strip anyone’s ever chosen for a photo, ever. Adam Snook and his wife Shannon. - Adam Snook, Facebook

Have you ever seen a more Saskatchewan couple in your life?

According to him, Snook couldn’t compete on price with the bigger players, so he lowered the bar on everything else by posting memes - tacky, grainy iPhone footage of some of Regina’s most vulnerable citizens - to his company’s social media channels.

Saskatchewan’s many bored minds, cynical, and endlessly amused by anything that punches at the province’s inferiority complex, followed him like the sheep they are.

Then the flock grasped the business model and started sending Adam Snook their own garbage… which he happily picks up for free.

Which brings us back to the collision near Lumsden and death of Jayden Dalke and one other man.

Saturday evening and throughout the day Sunday, Snook started posting screenshots of messages he’d received from alleged “eyewitnesses”. These included various allegations about Jayden Dalke’s condition and the way he was driving, prior to the accident.

Just Bins also posted a photo of what is allegedly Dalke’s vehicle shortly after the accident. It’s in the ditch resting on its driver’s side, a sheet draped over the front windshield to cover what is likely his dead body.

See, today Just Bins’ is infamous not for its “news”, but for its posts glorifying footage of people who are visibly intoxicated, in mental health crisis, homeless, or even dead - their dignity and Saskatchewan’s completely disregarded. Then of of course, Snook’s followers’ comments become a flaming dumpster fire of their own, degrading and mocking our friends and family at the lowest points in their life..

Snook flies a drone over active crime scenes in violation of Transport Canada rules, and the Regina Police Service has flagged it as a safety and privacy concern.

The content published on Just Bins’ is virtually guaranteed to generate outrage and contempt. His Dalke posts have caused chaos online, in the community, in Rider Nation. They have possibly tanked at least one dead man’s reputation while minimizing the death of another.

There is no accountability for the damage caused by a wound that’s not new. It’s been festering now for too many years. In fact, we keep sticking our fingers in it and making it worse.

Adam Snook runs his company’s social media accounts with 132,000 followers lapping up degrading content of a city of 250,000.

Think about that.

He is reaching, by some estimates, more people than any other single Saskatchewan news source — while operating with zero editorial standards, zero corrections policy, zero accountability to any professional or public interest obligation.

In fact, Just Bins social media channels skew hard toward the same populist, right-wing grievance culture that helped hollow out the Saskatchewan institutions Snook seems to believe he’s replacing.

It’s understandable why Snook might think he’s something he’s not.

In 2023, enough people were treating Adam Snook as their primary source of local news that when Prairie Dog Magazine - an established Regina newspaper - ran its “Best of Regina” reader poll, Just Bins’ fans flooded the site. Snook won the Best Online News and Best Social Media categories, beating out longtime, established local journalists and newsrooms.

Those votes were undoubtedly real, pumped by Snooks’ fans. Instead of disallowing Just Bins to appear in, at least, the “Online News” category, Prairie Dog’s editor made a critical error in judgment that essentially nailed shut Saskatchewan’s media coffin. Just Bins celebrated their Prairie Dog “win” with a line of merch and letting their comments section fill with posts celebrating the death of Saskatchewan’s mainstream media.

Prairie Dog Magazine removed their Best Online News category after Just Bins won it in a landslide. Then Prairie Dog Magazine folded altogether.

That is not a quirky footnote. That is a small, quiet, precise symbol of exactly what Just Bins is doing to the information ecosystem of this city: making the real thing seem pointless by replacing it with something louder, uglier and stupider.

Yet if you’ve heard anything about Just Bins, that’s like a synopsis of the story you’ve probably heard: framed as just more quirky Saskatchewan weirdness.

A Saskatchewan garbage company accidentally became a news outlet… isn’t that something? The underdog finally getting a win around here.

No. Fucking stop.

That framing lets everyone off the hook, which we all deserve to be hanging from.

Because here is what actually happened.

Saskatchewan spent twenty years systematically destroying the conditions under which serious local journalism could exist. Not through some coordinated conspiracy, through something more honest and more damning: indifference.

People cancelled subscriptions to the Star Phoenix and Leader-Post because it was cheaper not to pay. Advertisers followed eyeballs to Facebook. Postmedia gutted its newsroom, then gutted it again, and the Saskatchewan editor literally lives somewhere else now.

The media industry in Saskatchewan has been double-tapped by the fact our population has never and will never grow enough so that what’s left of traditional media companies will fund operations here again.

CTV Regina is a skeleton. The CBC, which Saskatchewan conservatives have spent a generation demanding be defunded, has been gutted by the very austerity politics those same people cheered.

Rawlco Radio — which I know intimately, having worked there for four years — has spent decades shaping Saskatchewan’s political conversation toward a particular kind of Saskatchewan grievance mode that feels like thinking without actually requiring any.

Everybody knows this, yet here’s Rawlco’s longtime news director and Temu-Anchorman Murray Wood recently gaslighting himself, his staff and whatever’s left of his audience:

“… a different story in Saskatchewan.”

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Delusional.

The information ecosystem in this province didn’t collapse.

It was abandoned.

The accident involving Jayden Dalke is going to be a hell of a litmus test for where this province’s moral compass really sits. Two men are dead. One is Dalke, the other appears to be a new Canadian, who was supposedly driving back to Regina on Saturday evening after working in Saskatoon.

Just Bins, through its pattern of publishing unverified information and tons of innuendo, has already loudly declared “what happened”.

And let’s be clear - he might be right.

That’s where Saskatchewan’s communications immaturity comes into play.

There’s no doubt the Roughriders had to issue a statement about Dalke’s death, quickly - but not that quickly. I’m loathed to believe all they heard was “car accident” before writing a tribute that ushered Dalke unequivocally into sainthood. Similar tributes immediately also came flying in from across the CFL, sports broadcasters and of course, Scott Moe.

Keeping in mind that there were two victims of this collision, everyone could have waited at least 24 fucking hours before saying anything.

With the exception of the Saskatchewan RCMP, who should have had a detailed statement issued by 6AM Sunday morning.

They are also a huge part of the problem.

Because the Saskatchewan RCMP is not only one of the worst law enforcement agencies in North America for promoting censorship, but has made the unthinkable, frankly frightening demand that media outlets ask them for permission before reporting facts from crime scenes.

That demand is not merely inappropriate; it is a direct affront to the basic principles of freedom of speech and an informed Saskatchewan public.

The RCMP do not exist to license journalism, and the idea that reporters must seek law enforcement approval before sharing facts with the public being served is chilling. It invites censorship, suppresses scrutiny, and creates the message that information belongs first to the cops, rather than to the public the RCMP serves.

In a democracy, media outlets are meant to question authority, not submit to it, and any attempt by the Saskatchewan RCMP to place themselves between the facts and the public is deeply dangerous.

But maybe that doesn’t matter either anymore, as it appears the broader Saskatchewan audience has decided that being entertained is the same as being informed.

Into that vacuum walked a man selling dumpsters.

The reality is Regina residents were starved for something that felt local, immediate, and unfiltered, and Snook built a product that delivered exactly that to 132,000 people. Nobody else, including myself, has been able to do better. No one in Saskatchewan’s independent media has that kind of audience.

It seems too many Saskatchewan people prefer garbage.

God knows Snook is not pretending to be a journalist. His own bio says he’s a garbage company that reposts memes. The cynicism is right there in the branding: “R\*gina,” the asterisk, a wink at the city’s unfortunate name.

Adam Snook knows exactly who and what he is.

What he also knows exactly who and what Saskatchewan is.

He knows exactly what he’s projecting when he posts references to “child tax cheques” and videos of Indigenous people drinking or fighting - the same racist trash I heard from my racist white trash family living in northern Saskatchewan, ever since I was a kid.

Well not anymore, because I haven’t spoken to them since they were the only people protesting the “jab” in their town. I think my uncle was standing on a street corner holding a horse tranquilizer?

Lol. Trash… and huge Just Bins fans.

Saskatchewan audiences have now been trained their whole lives to distrust the “other”. Nobody cares when “those people”, often brown-skinned and at their lowest moments, are dangled and mocked by thousands of strangers. John Gormley built a career out of it. Every provincial politician who ever ran against “Trudeau’s CBC” or “the elites” or “the mainstream media” or Scott Moe’s constant bitching and whining was writing Snook’s business plan for him.

The anti-establishment reflex in this province is so thoroughly broken that people will hand their understanding of their own city to a garbage man and truly believe they’re progressive.

This is not journalism filling a gap.

The hunger in Saskatchewan for real, trustworthy information is legitimate.

What’s being fed to it is not.

There is a difference between raw footage of an emergency scene and understanding what caused it, what should change, and who is accountable.

Conversely, Saskatchewan has a deep, abiding suspicion of anything that looks like it’s telling people what to think. I understand it. I grew up in it. I live it today.

This thinking has legitimate roots in a province that spent decades being lectured by Ottawa, by eastern media, by national institutions that didn’t know or care what Saskatchewan actually looked like, besides flat.

Today that reflex has been so thoroughly weaponized - by radio hosts, by politicians, by the entire gong show that is western Canada’s grievance politics - that it now functions as immunization against critical thought itself.

The moment anyone points at Just Bins and says ”this is not journalism,” a thousand voices rise up to howl ”the mainstream media is corrupt anyway” and ”at least Just Bins shows what’s really happening” and ”you just hate that people found an alternative.”

That response is not skepticism.

It is pure outrage theatre.

Real skepticism would ask: who is Adam Snook, what does he believe, what is he selecting and why, what is he leaving out, and what does he want me to feel when I’m done scrolling?

The comfortable version — the version that 132,000 people have chosen — is to call it “refreshingly honest” and click Follow.

The garbage is winning.

And the people of Saskatchewan handed it the keys.

That’s what the Just Bins mirror actually says about Saskatchewan.

About us.

It’s okay if this stings a little.

It should.

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