Sask. tables all seven crown corporation financials on same day

WATCH: All seven provincial crown corporations released their financials together Monday, in a move that's drawing criticism from the opposition NDP.

The province made the unusual move of tabling all crown corporation year-end financial reports at the same time Monday — criticized as a way to downplay the material by the official opposition.

Flanked by representatives of all seven crown corporations — SaskEnergy, SaskTel, SaskPower, SGI, Lotteries and Gaming Saskatchewan, SaskWater and the Crown Investments Corporation — Minister Jeremy Harrison spoke about crowns as a whole, after seeing more than $2.2 billion spent on infrastructure combined across all companies, resulting in $240 million in dividends sent back to the provincial general revenue fund.

“Our crown corporations are vital in sustaining a high standard of living in this beautiful province,” Harrison said during his initial address.

But the Saskatchewan NDP said the decision to publish all seven annual reports at the same time on Monday afternoon in Saskatoon — rather than spacing each report over multiple days in Regina, as is customary — was purposeful, and an attempt to minimize the negative aspects of each report.

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“The Sask. Party is trying to bury bad news, quietly dumping all Crown Corporation annual reports at once in an unprecedented move, as opposed to staggering their release, hoping Saskatchewan people wouldn’t see just how bad things have gotten,” Erika Ritchie, the opposition critic for crown corporations.

“We’ve read the reports, and the bottom line is this the Sask. Party is mismanaging our crowns and families across the province are going to be paying the price.”

When asked, Harrison found it interesting that the NDP’s strategy was to criticize the unveiling and not the subject matter.

“I find it very, very interesting that the NDP have not criticized anything in the actual reports, but instead they criticize the process. I think that says a whole lot right there, because this is a very, very strong report that is showing very healthy crown corporations that are doing incredibly good work and providing incredible benefit for the people of the province,” Harrison said.

Much of the attention Monday was on SaskPower after Harrison announced plans to extend the province’s coal-powered electrical stations beyond their lifespans last week, as a bridge to nuclear energy generation by 2050.

“We are going to be taking an all of the above approach to power generation,” Harrison said. “This isn’t ideological. If we had hydro, we’d be doing more hydro.”

The federal government passed regulations in 2016, and later altered them in 2018, requiring all coal-fired power plants to be closed down by 2030, whichever came first.

Harrison said the decision is the province’s alone and the federal government has no standing in the discussion of how provincial power is generated.

He also said conversations with the federal government have been “very different” under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s leadership than they were the past nine years under Justin Trudeau.

“The announcement last week, I guarantee, was no surprise at all to the federal government,” he said.

Harrison said Saskatchewan currently imports 90 per cent of its natural gas from outside the province. He also said extending the life of coal-powered plants would cost less than half of what it would cost to build new natural gas plants as demand on the power grid is expected to surge over the next three decades.

“If you’re deploying less capital, the cost curve in terms of both rates and the impacts on ratepayers — the steepness in that cost curve will be shallowed out,” SaskPower CEO Rupen Pandya said.

SaskPower reported a net income of $76 million in the 2024-2025 fiscal year, compared to $184 in net income the year prior.

Pandya says that was largely because Alberta’s inter tie, which connects its power system to other jurisdictions, was down for a period of time last year and limited the amount of electricity Saskatchewan could sell to its western neighbour.

Despite this, Pandya says SaskPower’s plans to nearly double its capacity by 2050 is ambitious, since the demand for electricity is expected to climb as reliance on electric vehicles and artificial intelligence may use much more electricity over the coming years.

“Between 2025 and 2050, to deploy another 5,000 megawatts or 6,000 megawatts of power will be an unprecedented challenge,” Pandya said.