05/19/2026
Scott Moe won't tell you this. In 1989-90, Conservative premier Grant Devine sold off taxpayer-owned PotashCorp. It was one of the worst deals for taxpayers in Canada's history.
PotashCorp was a publicly-owned crown corporation like SaskPower -- but for mining Potash. Established in 1975 by Rhodes Scholar and Premier Allan Blakeney, PotashCorp mined Potash and along with other new Crowns like SaskOil these innovative Crown corporations helped to pay for Saskatchewan's expansion of public social and health programs, helping to bring in a new era of prosperity for Saskatchewan in the 1970s.
That was all destroyed during the Grant Devine years of the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan espoused a dismantling of social programs and lowering of taxes for the wealthiest groups in society. The Devine government followed their philosophy of slashing and burning public services while delivering massive tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy until Saskatchewan nearly went bankrupt just before the Sask NDP took power in 1992.
Sound familiar?
Today the names BHP (Australia), Nutrien (Saskatoon), K+S (Germany), and Mosaic (Florida) are the four big players within the Potash industry in Saskatchewan. Potash is Saskatchewan's biggest economic driver and you can see the names of these corporations which extract billions of dollars of potash from Saskatchewan adorning places like Mosaic stadium, sponsoring the Premier's speeches, making vanity donations to places like the children's hospital, and in the donation records of Saskatchewan's political parties. The only way Potash revenue stays in Saskatchewan from the sale of Potash itself is through taxation and resource revenue taxing.
The massive potash extraction industry also helps to prop up the Sask Party's false GDP narrative. Although billions come from extracting potash out of Saskatchewan's lands, the actual profits go into Australian, European, and American bank accounts. So even though the Sask Party claims $18 billion per year in economic activity in our GDP, the vast majority of potash revenue rides right out of Saskatchewan in loaded railcars - never to return. The Sask Party gets to claim we have a hot economy in the same way that Sierra Leone has the hottest blood diamond economy. Another example of the Sask Party's "smoke and mirrors" economic policy.
The new study also talks about economic activity from jobs, but suggests that the royalty scheme is simply set to heavily favor the corporations over Sask citizens. Resource taxation and resource revenue is simply set too low.
There are clear impacts though, from economic activity, construction, and employment of Saskatchewan residents employed in mining the potash and shipping it out of Saskatchewan. Jobs for people in Sask are obviously positive and important for our province, and also allow the Government of Saskatchewan to collect income taxes, PST, and fuel tax on the money that workers make as local employees or contractors for BHP, Nutrien, K+S, and Mosaic.
Potash revenues to the taxpayers of Saskatchewan peaked at $2.9 billion in 2022, when sales of Sask potash peaked at $18 billion according to Johnson-Shoyama analyst Erin Weir. (https://www.schoolofpublicpolicy.sk.ca/documents/research/policy-briefs/jsgs-policypaper-potash-at-crossroads.pdf)
Should potash be taxed or its revenue shared more equally with the citizens of Saskatchewan? Should Saskatchewan re-nationalize its potash industry to keep more of the money from what is mined out of our ground rather than letting giant corporations from Australia, Florida, and Germany take massive uncontrolled profits on potash that comes from the lands we share with First Nations people?
These are questions that will have to be debated soon, as Saskatchewan wrestles with a $43 billion debt that grows each year. Scott Moe and Brad Wall's Sask Party debt represents the highest debt Saskatchewan has ever had in its history - even higher than when Grant Devine nearly bankrupted the province, just before Roy Romanow took over as premier in 1992.
