Meili was in Moose Jaw for a campaign stop on Wednesday afternoon, joining Moose Jaw North candidate Kyle Lichtenwald and Moose Jaw Wakamow candidate Melissa Patterson outside the SaskPower offices to reveal the party’s plan to address project procurement in the province.
“Somehow, the Sask Party manages every time to send the major projects out of the province, whether it’s the Regina bypass, the North Battleford hospital that has been plagued with troubles, they always manage to get a company from out of province or out of country to do the building,” Meili said.
“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 and our hospitals, our bridges with our tax dollars, we should be building them with our companies and our workers.”
Meili pointed to the financial climate in Saskatchewan as a major reason projects should stay in province.
“We had the worst performing economy in the nation in 2019, we were in a recession before we came into a pandemic, dead last in the country,” Meili said. “And Moose Jaw has been hard hit in recent years, and the Sask Party has not helped. They’ve taken hundreds of jobs out of this province, out of this city, jobs out of SaskPower, SaskTel and SaskEnergy, they’ve made it harder for Moose Jaw folks to make ends meet.”
One of the reasons Meili chose his hometown for the announcement was the current SaskPower power plant project. Bidding is down to two U.S. based companies -- Burns and McDonnell of Kansas City and the Kiewit Corporation out of Omaha -- and based on what he saw with the Swift Current power plant construction by the former, change is needed.
“Only 20 per cent of the money from that project went to Saskatchewan companies and only 44 per cent -- not even half of the workers on that job -- were from Saskatchewan,” Meili said. “I was out there when it was being built and you walk through the parking lot, the license plates were from all over the place and very few from Saskatchewan.”
The NDP plan would see a Sask First policy that would do that, putting businesses and workers from the province at the forefront of any new work that comes forward, something Meili believes Premier Scott Moe has little interest in doing.
“Scott Moe, he’s satisfied,” Meili said. “He doesn’t want 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 and he doesn’t want to change what’s helping his electoral hopes.
“New Democrats, we want to put Saskatchewan first and it comes from procurement because it’s all about our workers, it’s all about putting people first.”
