Rural areas need STC
It would appear the Saskatchewan Party has made a lot of blunders.
Rural Saskatchewan is a very large area that is sparsely populated and very much needed the Saskatchewan Transportation Company’s services for transport of seniors who required medical attention to Saskatoon and Regina.
STC also moved a lot of farm parts to farmers in more than 200 locations within the province.
There are no longer any provincial schedules, networks or depots. The people of Saskatchewan need seven-day service, not so called “sometimes service” or stand on some street corner to be hopefully picked up.
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The Sask Party indicated “private companies” would take up the slack, but why would they serve all of Saskatchewan? They will only invest in ventures that make them a profit. Therefore most of Saskatchewan will be without service.
STC was never meant to be profitable, but rather to serve the people of Saskatchewan. Efficiency could have been found in the system with the use of smaller buses and an acceptance that the transit system would need a subsidy just like all urban buses get in the cities.
With the STC passenger and freight services, I wonder if it was really losing money or was overhead in the cities killing it. Was STC a case of political interference? The Sask Party had no trouble raising the provincial sales tax and other tax increases in other areas and causing financial hardships on people.
Why wasn’t increased fares and freight rates and acceptance of a working fund for STC explored? Then these so called financial losses might have looked attractive compared to destroying the STC company and giving the people’s STC property and assets away.
Eric Sagan
Melville, Sask.
Renewable energy
Yes, I’m a prejudiced man and I admit it. The prejudice is rather narrowly focused as it is only about environmentally friendly electrical production. The prejudice favours the rapid transition from using dirty fossil fuels and nuclear power to clean, renewable electricity that can be produced and used on your own property, consuming nothing more vile than wind, sun, the basic wastes and pollutants that human activities created and we would never have to be cursed with blackouts like this recent SaskPower outage in the southeast of the province.
These periodic outages are ridiculous and totally avoidable. If people and communities were producing energy from south-facing or flat rooftops, agricultural wastes, landfills, lagoons, wind, moving water, biofuels, geothermal, we would never be subjected to these periodic outages.
Those technologies are getting better and cheaper every day and once they are paid off, we get endless free, environmentally friendly electrical power with usages only limited by our imaginations. There would be no more limitations by ever increasing power bills solely to maintain a massive, demanding, monopoly rapidly facing its own antiquity.
We can do this individually or as communities with no more tax costs than those who are now going to support dirty, devastating, energy production.
There is no future for the generations to come in dirty, non-renewable energy. There is a brilliant and blossoming future in clean, renewable, energy.
Do you not want reliable sustainability in electricity so your freezer, furnace and water systems continue to work when its 25 below? Take a serious look at energy independence. Independent power production, produced on your own property or locally produced and consumed minimizes much of the transmission prices and problems we presently face.
Renewable energy production is the answer to most of the economic and environmental problems we face as a human race. It creates lots of jobs, it adds value to your property, it turns present, polluting, wastes into power and heat, it respects and protects the environment and it keeps the lights on when everybody else is in the dark.
Greg Chatterson
Fort San, Sask.
