Former Sask Party Finance Minister identified as successful lobbyist in another provincial contract

Saskatchewan's Opposition NDP released new documents Tuesday showing that former Sask. Party Finance Minister Kevin Doherty lobbied for a US rubber recycling company. The company was later awarded a contract for services previously made by a Saskatchewan business.Opposition Leader Carla Beck criticized the action in a press release.“Handing this lucrative contract to an American company when a Saskatchewan-based business was already doing the work raises a lot of eyebrows,” said Beck.“It looks even more strange when we look in the lobbyist registry and see that Kevin Doherty was hired by this American company to lobby the premier in the year leading up to the announcement. The premier has a lot of explaining to do.”In November 2022, Doherty of Prairie Sky Strategy was hired by CRM Tire Processing of Newport Beach, CA to lobby Premier Scott Moe and his inner circle. Months later, the US company got a lucrative contract for tire recycling in Saskatchewan. Tire Stewardship of Saskatchewan (TSS), created in 2014 as an industry-funded nonprofit to oversee scrap tire recycling had contracted with Shercom to recycle tires for the whole province. The company invested millions of dollars in equipment in 2016 to do so. Their contract expired in 2020, but was repeatedly extended until spring 2023.Last year, TSS decided to offer two separate contracts, one for the north and one for the south, with CRM doing business out of a plant in Moose Jaw. The move led Shercom, which is also a manufacturer of rubber products, to halt its processing and shrink its total workforce from 137 to 75. The Greater Saskatoon Chamber of Commerce CEO Jason Aebig opposed the contract change in an open letter to government members.“Our concern is the apparent unwarranted regulation of a once ‘free market’ that is now siphoning jobs and market opportunities away from our city and reassigning them to business interests outside our borders,” Aebig wrote.Shercom CEO Marlin Stangeland told the StarPhoeix his company had been “stabbed in the back in our own back yard”. He accused TSS of making an “egregiously unfair” offer, including a rate structure that mimicked Alberta's, but with changes that seemed aimed at “penalizing” Shercom to CRM’s benefit.In November, Shercom president Shane Olson announced negotiations with TSS had failed and the company was shutting down its facilities. Olson told CTV a request to the TSS through the Freedom of Information Act yielded a study that supported two processing plants, but the 22-page report came to them completely redacted.News of Doherty's involvement in CRM comes as the premier and his health minister face questions over multi-million-dollar sole-source contracts with Surgical Centres Inc. (a division of Clearpoint Health Network) to perform knee and hip procedures and mammograms in Calgary.The company donated more than $14,000 to the Sask. Party and hired Doherty to lobby on their behalf through Prairie Sky Strategy.When asked in the legislature about tire recycling, Moe said the contract had been offered as an RFP and Shercom did not bid on it.Moe told reporters on Monday that Doherty wasn't the only former MLA to lobby the Sask Party government. He pointed to past NDP cabinet ministers Eric Cline lobbying for K+S Potash and past NDP leader Cam Broten who represented Associated Radiologists LLP.Moe also pointed out it was a Sask Party government that created the lobbyists' registry that was providing the disclosure the Opposition was using."There can't be favoritism happening. Because you represent someone with a government doesn't mean that there's favours that are occurring," Moe said."We see Mr. Broten's company receiving over $30 million in contracts and Mr. Doherty's receiving six."In a press conference following the legislature, NDP MLA Meara Conway said Doherty was not only connected to a $6 million sole-sourced contract for hip and knee surgeries but also a $2 million extension for mammograms."We see a concerning pattern of behavior around these sweetheart deals," Conway said, suggesting more disclosure was needed.Conway said if the NDP forms government, they will bring in legislation to require exactly who is being lobbied by whom and when. The current lobbying registry only lists people within the scope of lobbying interest within a given time period and the general means by which they may be engaged.

Former Sask Party Finance Minister identified as successful lobbyist in another provincial contract

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