With a new power plant soon to be built by SaskPower near Moose Jaw, the Saskatchewan New Democratic Leader headed there on Oct. 7 to emphasize that Saskatchewan companies and Saskatchewan workers should be doing the job.
It鈥檚 a point he鈥檚 repeated many times in recent weeks, as part of the party鈥檚 鈥淪ask. First鈥� platform.
Meili said, 鈥淲e know there's a SaskPower power plant set to be built here in Moose Jaw. And they're down to two proponents, both American companies and one of those proponents is Burns & McDonnell. Burns & McDonnell built the power plant in Swift Current. Only 20 per cent of the money from that project went to Saskatchewan companies at all. Only 44 per cent, not even half of the workers on that job, were from Saskatchewan. I was out there when it was getting built. You walked through the parking lot and the licence plates were from all over the place and very few from Saskatchewan."
Burns & McDonnell鈥檚 website notes how they were the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) firm for the 353-megawatt natural gas-fired Chinook Power plant, as well as recent work on the Queen Elizabeth Power Station in Saskatoon. The company has dozens of offices across the United States, as well as Toronto and Calgary offices. It is headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri. Its projects also include designing a neutrino detector for the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and consulting for Bruce Power at its nuclear power station at Tiverton, Ontario.
鈥淣ow, we want to see these projects go forward, but we want to see them go forward with Saskatchewan workers on the job. When we're building our roads, our power plants, our hospitals, our bridges, with our tax dollars, we should be building them with our companies and our workers. Scott Moe ... he's satisfied. He doesn't feel the need to change this. He doesn't even want to try. And you know why? Because his party gets all kinds of donations from out of province companies. He doesn't want to change what's helping fund his electoral hopes. New Democrats have a different approach. We want to put Saskatchewan first when it comes to procurement, because it's all about our workers. It's all about putting people first.鈥�
He pointed out how the Regina Bypass, a 40-kilometre flat road built around a prairie city, was built by a company from France, saying that it 鈥渄oesn鈥檛 make any sense to me at all. We need to make sure that it's our companies on the job, especially for our major projects.鈥�
Meili spoke of exploring community benefit agreements, as other provinces have. Referencing interprovincial agreements, he said, 鈥淲e're going to see what we can do within the context of the existing agreements. If they will not allow this, then we need to get back to the table and talk about how we can do what we need to do. This is too important, we cannot continue to send hundreds of millions of Saskatchewan public dollars out of the province, well, we've got workers off the job right here in the province.鈥�
