Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party has been re-elected in the province with a mandate to tackle rising costs and taxes, but a legal battle over climate policy looms, as a group of residents pursue a lawsuit challenging the province’s natural gas expansion.
In March, 2023, seven Saskatchewan residents filed the lawsuit, arguing that expanding gas-fired power generation violates their Section 7 Charter rights to life, liberty, and security. SaskPower is currently building a new gas plant near Moose Jaw, with another planned near Lanigan.
The suit asks the court to direct the provincial utility to make plans to decarbonize the provincial electrical grid, reported CBC News.
On October 4, lawyers for SaskPower, the Crown Investment Corporation, and the provincial government—the three parties named in the lawsuit—sought to have the case dismissed, arguing it lacks grounds for judicial action.
“We’re a year and a half in, and the government and SaskPower have said they don’t think this is justiciable, and they don’t think that this is a properly framed cause of action, and so they want the case tossed,” Glenn Wright, a Saskatchewan farmer, engineer, and lawyer representing the plaintiffs, told The Energy Mix in an interview.
The judge reserved her decision in this first-of-its-kind case for the province, where weeks later, Moe’s party gained its fifth consecutive term in the October 28 provincial election.
The province is poised to continue its stance against federal clean electricity regulations and carbon pricing, even as its own carbon tax on industrial emitters directs C$140 million per year to SaskPower for renewable energy and small modular nuclear reactors.
The election also revealed a “wider than ever” rural-urban divide, CBC News reports, with voters in cities showing overwhelming support for the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party, and rural Saskatchewan granting support to Moe’s Saskatchewan Party.
Amid the dissenters stand “seven real Saskatchewan people,” applicants in the lawsuit, which Wright says is on solid ground to move forward.
International laws on emissions and climate change have some role to play in considering the province’s actions and interpreting the Charter, and could support the plaintiffs’ arguments, Wright said. Furthermore, the Crown corporations named as defendants in the case are subject to a “duty of care” that obliges them to act in the best interests of the Crown and of the public, he added.
But Wright also conceded that the court system moves slowly—much more slowly than the urgency needed to address the growing impacts of climate change. He is concerned that eventually “the government may just argue that this is a moot point,” given that one of the contested plants is already under construction and the other is breaking ground.
“We had hoped we would have some influence to possibly prevent that second plant from being built, but it’s looking more and more like that’s going to happen regardless,” Wright said.
Representatives of SaskPower and Crown Investment Corporation did not provide comments when contacted for this story because it is an ongoing case, and because Crown corporation representatives are prohibited from engaging in public discussions regarding the province’s programs or policies during an election.
While the case is a first for Saskatchewan, there have been 38 climate-related legal challenges in Canada, reports CBC News. And a similar case was just revived in Ontario, with seven youth applicants challenging the province’s weakened emissions target.
