Energy Transition: A Just Future for Saskatchewan Workers and Communities

Saskatchewan’s economy has been built in significant part on fossil fuel extraction and export. Oil and potash revenues fund provincial services, support tens of thousands of jobs, and anchor the economic base of communities across the province. That foundation is changing — not because activists want it to, but because global energy markets, federal policy, and the physical reality of climate change are all moving in the same direction at the same time.

How Saskatchewan navigates that change will determine whether the workers and communities built around the existing energy economy are supported through the transition or left to absorb its costs alone. Organizations like Iron & Earth, a SaskForward partner, have been making the case for years that those workers have the skills, the experience, and the capacity to be central to the new energy economy — if the transition is planned with them rather than done to them.

Why energy transition is already underway in Saskatchewan

The federal clean electricity standard, which requires Canada’s electricity grid to be net-zero by 2035, applies to Saskatchewan alongside every other province. The federal carbon price creates ongoing cost pressure on fossil fuel use. International markets for Canadian oil and gas are subject to growing demand uncertainty as major economies shift their energy portfolios. And the physical effects of climate change, including drought, flooding, and heat events of increasing frequency and severity, are already affecting Saskatchewan agriculture and infrastructure in ways that create their own economic disruption.

These are not distant projections. They are current conditions. Companies operating in Saskatchewan’s energy sector are already making investment decisions based on assumptions about where markets and policy are heading. Workers and communities that are not part of that planning process are not protected by their absence from it — they simply have less information and less influence over outcomes that will affect them regardless.

What workers actually need from a just transition

The term “just transition” can sound like a policy abstraction. For an oil worker in Estevan or a gas plant operator in Lloydminster, what it means in practice is whether there will be comparable work available, whether their existing skills will be recognized and valued, whether retraining support will reach them in the community where they live rather than requiring them to move to a city, and whether the pension and benefit commitments they planned their lives around will be honoured through the change.

Transition planning that does not address all of these dimensions will fail the workers it claims to support. Access to retraining that requires a worker to move their family to Saskatoon or Regina is not genuinely accessible to a worker with a mortgage and school-age children in a smaller community. A plan that addresses the employment side of transition without touching pensions, benefits, and health coverage leaves workers facing the transition without the financial security they need to take risks and adapt.

A just transition is not a charitable gesture toward workers who are being left behind. It is a recognition that the workers who built Saskatchewan’s current energy economy have the skills and the right to be central to building the next one.

The skills that transfer — and the case Iron & Earth has been making

Iron & Earth was founded by oil sands workers who recognized that the skills required to build, operate, and maintain fossil fuel infrastructure overlap substantially with the skills required for renewable energy development. Welders, pipefitters, electricians, heavy equipment operators, safety inspectors, and project managers who have built careers in oil and gas can do the same work on wind farms, solar installations, geothermal projects, and hydrogen production facilities.

Research consistently supports this claim. Studies of the transferability of oil and gas worker skills to renewable energy roles find that the majority of core technical competencies apply across both sectors. The gap is not in the fundamental capabilities workers bring but in specific certifications, technology familiarity, and employer networks — gaps that targeted retraining can address without requiring workers to start over from the beginning of their careers.

This is the foundation of the just transition argument: it is not asking fossil fuel workers to sacrifice their livelihoods for the environment. It is asking the government to invest in connecting workers’ existing capabilities to the jobs that are coming, rather than allowing the transition to happen in a way that treats experienced workers as collateral damage.

Indigenous economic participation in the new energy economy

A just transition in Saskatchewan must include meaningful Indigenous economic participation in new energy infrastructure built on traditional territories. Wind and solar development, transmission line upgrades, and geothermal projects will involve land use decisions that affect First Nations and Métis communities across the province. Those communities have both the right to be consulted and the opportunity to be economic participants rather than simply bystanders to development decisions made without them.

Indigenous-owned or co-owned energy projects exist and are operating in other provinces. Saskatchewan has the land base, the wind resources, and the Indigenous communities with the capacity and the interest to develop them. What is required is a provincial policy framework that supports Indigenous ownership and economic participation, rather than one that treats new energy development as a business opportunity for the same companies that have dominated the fossil fuel sector.

The rural community question

Many of Saskatchewan’s smaller communities exist because of the fossil fuel economy. Their tax bases, their local employment, their service infrastructure, and their identity are tied to industries that may look significantly different in fifteen or twenty years. The risk of transition for these communities is not just individual job loss but the erosion of the economic base that makes community life viable — the tax revenue that funds local services, the spending that supports local businesses, the population that justifies keeping a school or a clinic open.

Transition planning that focuses only on individual workers without addressing community economic development will leave rural Saskatchewan with the same pattern seen in other resource-dependent regions: a generation of workers who found reasonable individual outcomes while the communities they came from slowly lost the capacity to sustain themselves. Preventing that outcome requires deliberate, place-based investment in economic diversification that starts before the transition forces the issue rather than after.

The case for planning now

The strongest argument for starting transition planning immediately is simply that delay makes every aspect of it harder. Workers who have more years before major employment disruption are more adaptable. Communities with more lead time to develop alternative economic anchors have more options. Governments that invest in transition infrastructure early face lower costs than those that respond to crisis. And provinces that are active participants in shaping federal transition policy have more influence over the outcomes than those that engage only after decisions have been made.

Saskatchewan’s government has largely taken the position that transition policy is premature, that the province’s fossil fuel economy should be defended rather than adapted. That position is increasingly difficult to sustain as the external conditions driving transition continue to evolve regardless of provincial preference. The workers and communities who will live with the consequences of that stance deserve a provincial government that is planning ahead on their behalf, rather than one that is hoping the need to plan will somehow go away.