At a potash mine not far from this Prairie town, a worker emerges from a cavernous storage facility, carrying a handful of potash into the light. The sun catches the chunks of salt-like material and, for a brief moment, makes them sparkle like diamonds.
It is, for an instant, a vision of a future many in Saskatchewan are convinced is theirs to seize, where a great underground deposit of this often-ignored substance is transformed into a glittering source of wealth.
BHP Billiton BHP-N$38.6-billion (U.S.) bid for Saskatchewan's largest potash producer, Potash Corp. POT-Thas alerted the world to what many here have long known: That the sweeping Prairie wheat fields are mere window dressing for what lies beneath. Saskatchewan is what Steve Halabura, a prominent Saskatoon geologist and entrepreneur, calls the motherlode, the Saudi Arabia of potash. The mineral, used to enrich crop production in farms around the world, is found here in more abundance than anywhere else on earth. Its thin underground layers, deposited here by an ancient sea, lie in a band that sweeps southern Saskatchewan from the Alberta to the Manitoba border and south to Montana.
Potash Corp., created and long owned by the Saskatchewan government, was born in a province whose tradition of government control has spawned a network of Crown corporations that figure prominently in major industries, such as telecom, natural gas and insurance, areas left in private hands in most other provinces. Foreign ownership has often been met with hostility.
But the BHP bid is being met with little resistance in Saskatchewan. In recent years, the province has been transformed by a global wave of demand for its resource treasures – oil, wheat, uranium and other minerals – that have created wealth never before enjoyed by a population previously accustomed to government-style enterprise. So rather than fear a new owner for the province’s corporate trophy, many welcome the BHP bid and are hopeful that if BHP makes good on a promise to base its potash operations in Saskatoon, the city will prosper from the growing global profile of the company.
“I, for one, take the view that what the hell is the difference” if BHP succeeds in its bid, says Don Ching, a long-time provincial business leader and civil servant who served on the Potash executive board when it was first made a Crown corporation in the 1970s.
That feeling comes in part from a broad disenfranchisement with Potash Corp. While its spectacular rise to dominant status in the fertilizer industry has elicited pride, Potash’s steps away from its roots – into assets around the globe and office space near Chicago, where chief executive officer Bill Doyle currently lives – have also uprooted it from its home. Some still remember the days when, shortly after the government took over the company, it lowered a bus a kilometre into the earth and took school kids and Lion’s Club members from all over the province on tours, to show them an asset they owned.
Though the tours still take place, much of the connection has vanished, and Potash, with its shareholders spread around the globe, already feels like a foreign company. Having it sold, many feel, will change little but the colour of its logo, perhaps substituting Australian red for Saskatchewan green.
That great trove of potash, after all, isn’t going anywhere. Potash is only found in a dozen countries, there’s no known fertilizer substitute and Saskatchewan has so much of it that people debate whether it’s a thousand-year supply or merely a few hundred. So unlike those places that have arguably suffered from foreign takeovers – think a year-long strike in Sudbury’s foreign-owned nickel mines or job losses in the steel sector in Hamilton – this province believes the industry’s growth is a given, and layoffs and shrinkage a nearly non-existent possibility.
