The president of the company formerly entrusted with all of Saskatchewan's tire recycling says assurances Scott Moe made were not fulfilled.At a press conference Tuesday, Shercom Industries president Shane Olson recalled conversations with then-environment minister Moe following a major fire that had devastated the rubber product manufacturer in 2016."I met directly with the Minister of Environment at the time, and said, 'Listen, we're preparing to be invest, and it's a multimillion dollar plant. And the economies are such that it will process all the tires in the province. But frankly, it's not a safe environment to invest. We need assurance of supply, a long term contract, and a voice in the future of the industry,” he said."So with that, we built this plant with a 20-year payback period."Those changes involved a replacement of Saskatchewan Scrap Tire Corporation with Tire Stewardship of Saskatchewan (TSS) in 2017. Shercom stopped recycling tires in April 2023 after TSS issued a request for proposals calling for a new processor for the south and granted it to California-based CRM Tire Processing.NDP Opposition Leader Carla Beck asked Premier Scott Moe in the legislature if such assurances were made."Did the premier make that promise back in 2016? And if so, why did he break it?" Beck asked.Moe replied, "(T)he allocation of tires in this province are not by any words of the minister, they’re by the industry-led organization that determines where those tires are going. There was a sole-source contract for a number of years, which has changed now to an RFP (request for proposal).""There was no government interference with that whatsoever, and I don’t know where that came from or why someone would say something like that. It had nothing to do with anything from the government."Regardless, Olson had an unflattering assessment of the TSS: “A lot of what’s happening in the last three years is really an ambush."Olson said that TSS executive director Stevyn Arnt visited Shercom's plant in 2020 but would not increase what it paid Shercom to process tires."He came and then went back and said, 'No, there’s going to be no increase… In fact the best we can do is a 30% decrease' — and that’s crazy," Olson recalled.When Olson replied they could not do it for that price, TSS started looking elsewhere.“That’s when they started talking about a second processor," Olson recalled.Olson said that having multiple processors in Saskatchewan had already been attempted — and failed.“To bring that back and suggest we go back to a two-processor model when all the other processors that entered the province of Saskatchewan went bankrupt, speaks to the fact that there’s not any room for two processors. Why bring in a processor that doesn’t actually do anything?”Olson said the protests fell on deaf ears, and the value-added components TSS promised to emerge from the new contract were things already done by Shercom."The bottom line is, Shercom was excluded from the RFP. We raised legitimate concerns with the TSS and with the ministry, and they basically shoved it through and had this contract signed behind closed doors," Olson said.
