Unifor unites workers across four Crown corporations: 3,000 at SaskTel, 850 at SaskEnergy, 600 at SaskPower, and 100 at SaskWater. Saskatchewan’s Crown corporations are integral to the daily lives of working families. Crowns provide top-quality services, create thousands of good, local jobs, and generate revenue for the province.
In 2023-24, Crown corporations invested $1.9 billion in infrastructure that included cellular and fibre optic connectivity, power station projects, natural gas distribution, and non-potable water supplies systems.1
Crown corporations don’t cost the government anything, rather they make money. In 2023-24, Crown corporations contributed $152 million in dividends to the province’s General Revenue Fund. Over the last decade, the Crowns have provided over $2 billion to the province’s General Revenue Fund2 – money that has supported government services such as hospitals and schools.
The current Sask government has aggressively privatized many operations of the Crowns, usually in the form of out-sourcing work from unionized Crown departments to low-wage companies.
Because it is not a full-scale sell-off of the whole company, this privatization by stealth does not get the same headlines, but it still kills good local jobs (often sending them out of the province) and cheapens customer service.
The new government must stop the privatization of our Crown corporations and make a plan to repatriate all out-of-province and overseas jobs. Privatization must be rejected by all parties and Saskatchewan’s Crowns must be protected in the public interest.
2Saskatchewan Crown Investments Corporation (CIC) annual reports
