$7.6 MILLION TO DISSOLVE STC
Province ignores NDP push for itemized list of asset sales but reveals lion’s share of windup costs — some $5.8M — went to severance pay.
Dissolving the Saskatchewan Transportation Company (STC) cost the provincial government $7.6 million.
But the province says it will not provide a line-by-line break down of money made from selling assets of the former Crown corporation.
Most of cost to dissolve the bus company — $5.8 million — was made up of severance payments and other forms of compensation to former employees, including money awarded by an arbitrator to 95 former employees after STC was found to be in violation of the labour code.
Additional dollars incurred during the wind down were for legal costs.
In March 2017, the Saskatchewan Party government announced in its unpopular austerity budget that it was shuttering the 71-yearoldCrownagency.
To date, the province has made $27.6 million selling STC assets. All of STC’s properties have now been sold, save for a Regina-based maintenance facility, which has a book value of $2 million and is expected, according to the government, to be sold by next spring.
Saskatchewan’s Opposition NDP is calling for the province to release a line-by-line break down of asset sales, but Joe Hargrave, the Crown Investment Corporation (CIC) minister, made clear Friday that would not happen.
He cited “highly competitive” business and the effect revealing sale figures could have on “future bids, not only with our government but with other companies they deal with” as the reason why that level of detail would not be released.
But NDP MLA Nicole Sarauer contends the public has a right to know how much the province made for each item sold from STC, because they were paid for with public dollars.
STC paid $22 million in dividends to CIC and in total earned $503 million in its 2017-18 fiscal year.
The public bus company was shut down, in part, because the province did not want to continue subsidizing the service. Ridership declined by 77 per cent since 1980 and subsidies required to support its operations were forecast to cost more than $85 million in the next five years.
Oddly, Hargrave said Friday a beheading on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba 10 years ago was the tipping point for bus ridership in Saskatchewan.
He told reporters ridership “dropped like a rock” after Vince Li, who now goes by the name Will Baker, beheaded and cannibalized fellow passenger Tim McLean on a Greyhound bus that was bound for Winnipeg on July 30, 2008.
While STC’s 2009 annual report notes a “formerly growing ridership has declined due to residual effects” stemming from the killing, there had already been significant declines in overall ridership.
The company’s first-quarter report from 2009 noted ridership had dropped 8.5 per cent since the incident — but data provided by the province on Friday shows there were more significant declines in STC use during the early to mid 1990s (between 1990 and 1995, there was a 41-per-cent decline in ridership).