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Comment by rikthevik | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Saskatchewan resident. It's easy to grumble about the phone company, but Sasktel does a great job. We're a huge low-density province, but with the crown corp mandates, small towns in Saskatchewan have excellent cell and fibre service. There's no way a private company invests like that. Saskatchewan gets better and faster service for less money.

We also have a provincial auto insurer, SGI. The prices for car insurance in Alberta or Ontario are ludicrous in comparison. The power and natural gas crowns are decent, as far as I can tell.

https://twitter.com/wingkarli/status/1582019472315289601 > Canada is just five big banks, two grocery chains, and three telecom giants in a puffer down jacket.

I'm not sure if federal crowns would be any better, but some competition would be a start.

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It's really sad how other provinces sold off their crown corps to their detriment and even Sask, long a leader in this area, has turned away from these sort of policies in recent years.

Saskatchewan politics don't make a lot of sense to me. I'm not sure how the "let's work together" mentality that gave us the Co-op, the Wheat Pool, and Medicare turned into a "fuck you, I got mine" mentality.

I think it is sadly a result of influence of their lucky and wealthy neighbour Alberta and trying to replicate that success using misguided cargo cult methods.

Alberta of course massively wealthy due to the fortunes springing up out of the ground, and over the years has been able to draw Canadians from all sorts of places at times where their own home province was relatively economically depressed.

Alberta also has a conservative political culture and some unique ideas around how to organize things that were particularly different from, as you said, the "let's work together" approach of Sask under visionary leader Tommy Douglas and those that followed that social democratic road map.

So I think you had a combination of Sask folks going to Alberta to work in the oil sands and picking up the politics and coming back with it, and the centralized conservative media touting Albertan success across the border as a road map for Saskachewan success.

Of course the reality is that Alberta's success likely has a lot a lot less to do with their political policy choices, and a hell of a lot more to do with the fact that they get absolutely ginormous oil royalties that funds their every budget wish.

Saskachewan trying to replicate what Alberta has via the policy side, without the resource royalty side, well they're not going to see the same outcomes.

> Of course the reality is that Alberta's success likely has a lot a lot less to do with their political policy choices, and a hell of a lot more to do with the fact that they get absolutely ginormous oil royalties that funds their every budget wish.

I think this also reflected in their bimodal provincial politics. Unlike other province, there's just two teams, and they're the polar opposites (provincial NDP squarely on the left, UCP on the very-right for folks from outside Canada).

Even within the space privatizing Manitoba Telecom / MTS was a huge loss.

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