Saskatchewan farmers got the bad news from Saskatchewan Power Corporation in two stages last winter.
First, there was notice of a 12 percent increase in rates. Then came notice of a monthly, $4.95 fee “for rebuilding infrastructure.”
It was the beginning of what is expected to be a pattern of higher power rates for rural Saskatchewan consumers as Sask-Power shifts its focus from subsidized rural service to cost-competitive service for large industrial users.
It wasn’t always so.
SaskPower was created by politicians with a different vision.
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It was 1947 when points of light began to appear in the prairie night.
Brighter than the kerosene and gas lamps they replaced, the darkness which had shrouded countryside previously studded only with telephone poles would forever be banished to only the most remote areas of the post-war Prairies.
Reaching out to rural residents
Electricity began to flow across the wheat fields, along the road sides and rail lines to Saskatchewan farms.
The government electricity utility, Saskat-chewan Power, had started to string wire that eventually would stretch far enough to reach more than two and one-half times around the globe.
By the 1970s, that wire would reach further than any other North American power utility. The governments of the day took rural electrification very seriously.
Government saw electricity as a way to modernize prairie agriculture and to make rural people more competitive with the rest of the world.
“Utilities were used as instruments of social policy,” said Eldon Lautermilch, provincial minister with the NDP in charge of SaskPower today.
The policy of the day held that while stringing all that power line was costly, rural users were insulated from the full costs in favor of a fully serviced province in the greater public interest. Industrial and commercial users subsidized the cost.
The potash, oil and gas, steel, chemical, pulp and paper, petroleum refining and mining industries paid up to 170 percent of a true cost-based market price for their power. Urban and farm rates seldom exceeded 60 percent of their true value.
“There wouldn’t be the infrastructure that exists now if there hadn’t been a crown corporation to put it in place…no private company would have been able to afford the process,” said Jack Messer, president of SaskPower.
Saskatchewan was not alone in this formula for rural electrification. Other provinces and American states had similar strategies but perhaps no where else has the program cut as wide a swath as in Saskatchewan.
