The age-old Saskatchewan problem of not having a major urban presence hit home quickly in 2018. It’s an all-too-familiar story.
Sure, Regina and Saskatoon have become two of Canada’s fastest growing cities in the past decade, becoming bigger, more diverse and more cosmopolitan.
But as late starters to last century’s urban boom, our cities lag behind most other urban centres.
Many would argue Saskatchewan does just fine as a rural, agriculturally-based province whose economy is underpinned by natural resources.
However, what now separates Saskatchewan from Manitoba and even Alberta may very well be the presence of those provinces’ larger cities like Winnipeg, Calgary and Edmonton.
For example, the recent economic downturn across the Prairies saw all three provinces shed jobs.
But by having larger urban centres with less people directly susceptible to the whims of agriculture and the oilpatch, other Prairie provinces have been able to more quickly stabilize economic job losses and it may be starting to show.
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Again, Saskatchewan is facing its age-old dilemma of more people moving out than moving in. (The reason Saskatchewan population grew to 1,168,000, according to the latest Statistics Canada figures based on Oct. 1 numbers, was largely because of births exceeding deaths.)
Why people move from smaller communities to larger ones is no secret to those who have lived in rural Saskatchewan. Larger urban centres provide amenities that offer more jobs and the larger a community becomes, the more amenities it’s likely to have.
For example, one of the big problems Premier Brad Wall and his predecessors have had in either luring or attracting head office jobs to Saskatchewan is the lack of a truly international airport with direct flights to other countries and even other cities in Canada.
Such problems become a double-edged sword when it comes to attracting office jobs. The less head office jobs you have, the less need for major legal or accounting firms to serve them.
Why many of the best and brightest from this province have wound up in Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto or Vancouver is directly related to aforementioned opportunities larger cities provide.
Moreover, larger cities also afford those working for big companies with a lifestyle that smaller cities and towns can’t provide.
Even businesses directly linked to agriculture or Saskatchewan’s resource-based economy have a strong preference to be located in bigger urban centres.
And sometimes no amount of government incentives for locating head office jobs in Saskatchewan works all that well.
The following is worthy of consideration in light of the New Year’s news that Nutrien Ltd. – the company that’s emerged from last year’s merger of Agrium Inc. and Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. – has started trading on the Toronto and New York Stock Exchanges.
It was big new business news, as new Nutrien shareholders got .4 shares in the new company for each common share of PotashCorp they owned and 2.23 shares for each Agrium share.
But even bigger news in the coming year may be whether our 30-year-old legislation – the one enacted when old Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Crown corporation was privatized – holds up in the wake of this merger.
That legislation required that PCS head office jobs remain in Saskatchewan. It worked, but never quite as well as the government suggested.
The privatized PCS found ways to dance around that law, maintaining what amounted to a head office in Chicago, where Bill Doyle and other PCS officials were located.
And now with the Calgary-based Agrium having a big presence in this merger, whether Saskatoon will really be Nutrien’s new headquarters is a legitimate question.
It may be farmers and rural people who buy Nutrien’s products, but when it comes to jobs, it may also be the same old story for a rural-based province like Saskatchewan.
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