Saskatchewan sits atop roughly a third of the world’s known potash reserves, a geological inheritance that has defined provincial politics for generations. The question of who controls that resource — private multinationals, a provincial Crown corporation, or some hybrid of both — has driven elections, shaped party platforms, and pitted Saskatchewan governments against Ottawa in ways that still echo today.
The Discovery and the First Royalty Wars
Commercial potash mining in Saskatchewan began in the 1950s, when private companies acquired mineral leases and opened the first mines near Esterhazy and Lanigan. By the early 1970s a dozen operations were extracting the mineral and exporting it to fertiliser markets in Asia, North America, and Europe. The province collected royalties, but many Saskatchewan residents and politicians felt those royalties bore no reasonable relationship to the value being extracted from the ground.
Premier Allan Blakeney’s NDP government, elected in 1971, moved to change the terms. A series of royalty increases through the mid-1970s triggered a protracted legal and political confrontation with the mining companies, culminating in a 1977 Supreme Court of Canada decision that partly upheld provincial authority over resource taxation. Blakeney’s government also pursued partial nationalisation: the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan was created in 1975, acquiring equity positions in several mines through purchases that gave the province both a revenue stake and operational knowledge of the industry.
Privatisation and the Devine Era
Grant Devine’s Progressive Conservative government, elected in 1982, reversed course. The ideological shift was sharp: where Blakeney had seen Crown ownership as a tool for capturing resource rents on behalf of citizens, Devine’s government saw it as an unnecessary intrusion into markets best left to private enterprise. The privatisation of the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan proceeded through a share offering in 1989, transforming the Crown corporation into a publicly traded company headquartered in Saskatoon.
The decision was controversial at the time and has remained so. Defenders argued that private capital would manage the company more efficiently and that the province retained tax revenue regardless of ownership structure. Critics noted that the public had effectively paid to develop the enterprise and then sold it at a moment when commodity prices were depressed — a transfer of wealth to investors rather than to the citizens who owned the resource.
The BHP Billiton Bid and Brad Wall’s Defence
The most dramatic moment in Saskatchewan’s modern resource politics came in August 2010, when Australian mining giant BHP Billiton launched a hostile $38-billion takeover bid for Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan, by then the world’s largest potash producer. Premier Brad Wall mounted an aggressive public campaign against the acquisition, arguing that a foreign takeover would remove head-office decision-making from the province, reduce tax revenues, and transfer control of a strategic resource to interests with no obligation to Saskatchewan’s long-term economic development.
Wall lobbied the federal government, spoke to industry groups, and made the case in national media that the Investment Canada Act provisions protecting strategic industries should be applied to block the bid. In November 2010 the federal Conservative government under Stephen Harper rejected the acquisition on the grounds that it did not provide a “net benefit” to Canada — a rarely used provision that Wall’s intervention had made politically impossible to ignore. The decision was widely interpreted as a significant assertion of provincial and national sovereignty over resource assets.
Nutrien and the Present
The Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan merged with Agrium, another Canadian fertiliser company, in 2018 to form Nutrien, the world’s largest producer of potash and nitrogen fertilisers. The combined company remains headquartered in Saskatoon, employs thousands of Saskatchewan residents, and pays significant provincial royalties and taxes. Whether that arrangement adequately compensates the public for the depletion of a non-renewable resource remains a live political question.
The debate over potash ownership and royalties is ultimately a debate about inter-generational equity: how much of the value of a finite geological inheritance should be captured now for current public services, how much should be saved in a heritage fund, and how much should remain with the private sector as an incentive for continued investment and extraction. The Saskatchewan government’s royalty framework has evolved repeatedly over the decades, and the argument about whether it strikes the right balance shows no signs of being resolved.