Yes, the Sask Party Is Lying To You About Sask Power
They don't even need to charge you the carbon tax on your bill anymore, but they're still doing it. Even better - instead of turning it over to Justin Trudeau, the Sask Party is keeping the money.
Sorry this one is later than usual. I moved out of my condo yesterday and forgot what a headache that is, especially when it’s minus 50.
You’ve read this in my previous posts, but in case you missed it, I’m leaving Saskatchewan. I can’t live and work here anymore. I’ve been blacklisted by both the Saskatchewan NDP and the Sask Party for doing what I do, along with their peripheral stakeholders and supporters.
Who I am has been defined for me by power-hungry, desperate and angry people in ways that I can’t seem to overcome. I have had my skills, personality, professionalism and existence degraded, particularly from the province’s only conservative talk radio show, for not conforming to their narrative.
I would like to come back to Saskatchewan when the lease on my house in the Caribbean is up in six months, but the point of going away is to determine if I can ever live here again. You can subscribe here if you’d like to follow along on that journey.
I’m the only media in this province who has focused on the sharing the complete truth with you in recent years and now I have to leave it for doing so. Good things don’t happen when you live in a tiny backwater and you are the only person in it who will tell the whole political story, regardless of who doesn’t want you to or why.
In that vein, you may have heard at some point that I am a “paid NDP hack”, but I’ve never been paid by or worked for the Saskatchewan NDP.
I did get paid by you, however, Saskatchewan taxpayer.
To get around the Saskatchewan NDP’s petty anti-Meili bullshit, from 2017 until she decided to retire in 2020 I conducted research independently for Saskatoon Nutana MLA Cathy Sproule (and at times, Danielle Chartier) on their Opposition critic files. I was paid by the Government of Saskatchewan.
Your Majesty’s Official Opposition’s job is to hold democracy together by holding the government accountable. It’s rather important; just look around you for evidence of what happens when it falls apart.
With a tiny Opposition caucus comes tiny government accountability, so Sproule and I hauled ass to try to get to as many issues as we could. She was often assigned the more complex files and SaskPower was a big part of her portfolio.
What is SaskPower, I hear no one asking?
Sure, it’s where you get your lights, but it’s more complicated than that.
SaskPower is a multi-billion dollar carbon capture facility, the carbon capture “Knowledge Centre”, billions of dollars in assets, and of course, the carbon tax. It is arguably the province’s most complex Crown corporation, dealing with crucial issues like the environment and our emissions profile, the province’s financial position and our future with renewable energy.
It’s a cash cow for the Saskatchewan government, highly profitable and constantly sucked clean of any spare cash it has lying around.
Last week the Minister responsible for SaskPower, Don Morgan, rolled out the company’s 2022-23 second-quarter financial update (meaning April 1 through September 30, 2022).
For only the second time in at least as many decades, SaskPower recorded a deficit.
Not a small one either, it’s out $100mil.
In statements to reporters on the subject, Morgan muttered something about the deficit being attributed to system maintenance and the increased price of natural gas, then repeatedly shouted from the rooftops that it was really the carbon tax.
"We've had significant increases in some of our supply costs: 38 per cent increase to natural gas, 36 per cent increase to coal, [plus] both coal and natural gas attract carbon tax, which is a significant expense as well," Don Morgan, January 16, 2023
“… we had to use natural gas, which is more expensive and had triggered carbon tax on it.” - Don Morgan, CKOM, January 16, 2023
Attributing an operational deficit at SaskPower to the carbon tax is ludicrous. Don Morgan knows damn well he’s misleading ratepayers by implying it has anything to do with the fact the company lost $100-million in six months.
The carbon tax is charged as a rate rider on your bill, as opposed to rolling it into the rate like every other cost SaskPower incurs. SaskPower’s executive leadership, not the rate review panel, determines the amount of that rate rider.
The carbon tax amount you pay on your bill is determined by SaskPower but essentially flows directly from the ratepayer, through SaskPower to the feds.
How else would we remember to blame Trudeau if we didn’t see how much we’re paying?
To-date, the carbon tax revenue SaskPower has collected from its ratepayers has been revenue neutral.
TL;DR (above): The government has a separate bank account to reconcile the carbon tax revenue collected from your SaskPower bill. From that separate account SaskPower pays whatever it owes the feds for carbon emissions, based on how far it went over the cap.
You’ll note above that in the first pandemic year of 2020, Sask Power charged its customers 43-million dollars more for the carbon tax than it was required to remit.
According to page seven of SaskPower’s second quarter report, SaskPower started collecting carbon tax from us in April 2019 and didn’t even remit its first payment to the feds until two years later.
As of the end of March 2022, they’d still charged us $9-million more than they’d remitted to the feds.
By 2020 the SaskPower had already grossly overcharged ratepayers for the carbon tax. That is the real reason why it did not increase the carbon tax rate rider on our bills in the calendar year of 2022.
That is not what they told us at the time, however:
“Because of reduced emissions from coal generation, the addition of more than 400 megawatts of wind, solar, and biomass, as well as an improved outlook on hydro generation, SaskPower is able to avoid passing Federal Carbon Tax rate increases on to customers in 2022.” Don Morgan, SaskPower news release, December 15, 2021
The Sask Party government could not give a single f**k about your household budget. They made you start paying early, often and too much, just to validate their constant howling about the carbon tax and Justin Trudeau.
By the end of the second quarter of 2022, or the end of September last year, SaskPower’s carbon tax account had zeroed out.
In December of 2022, SaskPower announced that it was increasing the rate rider for the carbon tax for 2023 by three percent.
“We are striving to achieve these goals while keeping rates as low as possible while complying with a federal regulatory framework that requires us to collect additional carbon tax revenue.” - Rupen Pandya, SaskPower President and CEO, December 9, 2022
We’re paying Sask Party stooge Rupen Pandya hundreds of thousands of ratepayers’ dollars per year and he chooses to confuse customers instead of convincing them.
The curious thing about Pandya’s statement is just a couple weeks before he released it, the Saskatchewan government announced that now it is in charge of carbon tax revenue.
“All industrial carbon taxes will now stay in Saskatchewan, saving Saskatchewan industry (and the jobs and families these industries support) an estimated $3.7 billion in federal carbon taxes between now and 2030 compared to federal carbon pricing…” - Saskatchewan.ca, November 22, 2022
In classic fashion, when that little gem was released it was underplayed by the Sask Party government. They put up Saskatchewan’s environment minister instead of Don Morgan to tell us that, well… um, they weren’t really sure what that meant for utility bills.
So the Sask Party managed to add the carbon tax to your bill two years ahead in advance, but now can’t figure out how to take it off.
In summary:
Your power rate went up at SaskPower four percent in September of 2022 and that’s probably a good thing, given operational revenue and expenses are the sole driver of SaskPower deficits and it is clearly overspending.
Your carbon tax rate rider went up three percent as of January 1, 2023, despite the fact the Sask Party government doesn’t even need to charge it, but is doing so anyway and keeping the revenue.
Your power rate is going to go up again in April 2023 by another four percent.
All three of those decisions were made by SaskPower and only SaskPower.
Those decisions were made because of SaskPower’s own internal operating inefficiencies, nothing more.
It’s incredibly misleading to suggest otherwise, yet this government, including both the Minister responsible and the CEO of SaskPower, continue to deliberately blur and obscure the lines regarding what you’re paying for and why that cost is skyrocketing.
Did fuel costs, particularly the price of natural gas, impact SaskPower’s bottom line last year?
Sure.
The price of natural gas began to skyrocket midway through 2021 and definitely had an impact on SaskPower’s bottom line.
“Fuel and purchased power costs, excluding the federal carbon charge, were $856 million in 2021-22, up $141 million from 2020-21… higher fuel prices resulted in an overall increase of approximately $5 million due to increases in natural gas and import prices compared to 2020-21.” - SaskPower 2021-2022 annual report, pg 34.
An overall increase of a whopping $5-million over the entire fiscal year 2021-2022, but we’re blaming it for a second-quarter $100-mil deficit?
Natural gas prices are also now coming back down.
The financial results are pretty clear where the issues are. Yes, spending on fuel is up over the same period the year before.
However look at the second quarter 2022-23 report’s maintenance number, up $58-million over the same period the year prior.
Now look at that number from the same chart from SaskPower’s second quarter report released in 2020-2021.
And 2021-22.
I could copy and paste any number of these charts going back as far as you like, but the results will all be similar. Year over year, the amount spent on maintenance of SaskPower’s assets doesn’t change. Some years it even went down from the year before. Maintaining SaskPower’s infrastructure has not been a priority for this government and it shows.
From the Saskatchewan Auditor’s Report Vol. 2, Ch. 25, released December 11th, 2018:
“Over the past five years, aging infrastructure caused 34% of SaskPower’s unplanned power outages…SaskPower did not have effective processes to maintain its above-ground assets …has not determined the condition at which it expected to keep most of its above-ground distribution assets...does not have complete and consistent data about its assets… did not complete almost one-half of its preventative maintenance.”
In June of 2022 the Auditor released a follow-up to that damning 2018 report. It shows that SaskPower has implemented recommendations regarding creating processes to actually assess its own assets. Great job guys!
However, that follow-up report also states:
“SaskPower acknowledged it has not implemented a process to assess the consequences of not completing corrective maintenance. Management indicated it has initiated process development for planned corrective maintenance that it intends to implement in 2022–23, which will include assessing the consequences of not completing corrective maintenance.”
It also says,
“SaskPower reported quarterly to its senior management on the status of its maintenance activities, but the reports did not include all maintenance activities and did not include the consequences of not completing planned maintenance for above-ground distribution assets…SaskPower did not separately budget for unplanned corrective maintenance, so it used the average actual costs from the prior three years as a proxy for the budget…it plans to review corrective maintenance processes in 2022–23…”
The point of all this is that SaskPower was not assessing or maintaining its own assets until it got caught by the auditor. Despite the provincial auditor’s warnings, last summer they still had not came up with a plan.
Suddenly that boosted $58-million maintenance increase in the 2022-23 second quarter report makes way more sense, but what boggles the mind is the potential cost of all that deferred, incomplete maintenance to SaskPower assets, which I’m willing to bet is in the billions.
I don’t expect Don Morgan to come out and tell us the truth, because if Don Morgan’s lips are moving these days, he’s lying. Wouldn’t it be grand, however, if either he or Rupen Pandya treated ratepayers like adults who own the goddamn company and actually tried to be insightful, instead of dribbling out easily disproved pap like they do?
I guess I’d be out of a gig then, wouldn’t I.
Debunking the constant lying from the provincial government is exhausting. Managing your affairs in Saskatchewan, at this rate, is nearly impossible, because you are prevented at every turn from receiving any honest information on everything from the cost of living to how fast our healthcare system is going to kill you.
Have a great week,
