Saskatchewan plans to offer high school classes to prepare students for a career in the oil and gas industry — which accounts for less than one per cent of jobs.
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You can surmise how little Saskatchewan’s government thinks of its education system, since it believes people are gullible enough to see merit in new oil and gas classes.
The Saskatchewan Party government announced last week that it has struck a deal with Teine Energy to “develop” new oil and gas classes for high school students.
The Calgary-based company is ponying up $150,000 over two years to come up with online courses — including 50 hours of “online theory” — and work placements through the Saskatchewan Distance Learning Centre.
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The optics of handing over education — even a small, elective slice of it — to a private company are terrible, especially given that Teine donated $10,000 to the governing party in 2018.
What’s worse is that this is seen as a priority for the government amid a dispute with teachers that hinges on what all sides seem to agree are the issues of class size and complexity.
You might think a provincial government would be laser-focused on solving that functional issue, but there always seems to be time for oil and gas.
If the industry accounted for a major slice of Saskatchewan’s employment pie or a voluminous chunk of the province’s economy, you could understand this venture.
Instead, it seems like we’re constantly being oil-and-gas-lighted by this provincial government on the sector’s importance, to the degree that fighting any sort of climate action that might affect the oil industry has become the province’s brand.
But oil and gas extraction and related industries only employed 5,100 people in the province in 2021, or less than one per cent of the total workforce, according to Statistics Canada. The University of Saskatchewan employs more people, but how often does the government talk about that institution?
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When it comes to the economy, oil and gas amounted to about nine per cent of gross domestic product in 2022. That’s significant, but it fails to justify the industry frequently capturing 100 per cent of the government’s focus.
Compare these numbers to Alberta, where the sector and spinoff activities employ 135,000 people, or six per cent of the province’s workforce. Oil and gas contribute more than 21 per cent of our neighbouring province’s GDP.
You can understand why Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is an oil and gas champion, but it’s less easy to explain for Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe. Yet it’s been so effective that the Opposition NDP in this province rarely, if ever, questions making this industry such a provincial priority.
It now appears the province has sold a sliver of its education system to an oil company for propaganda purposes. Even if these courses effectively prepare high school students for careers in the oil and gas industry, it looks like they’ll probably be moving to Alberta for more and better opportunities.
That’s certainly in keeping with the 11,458 people — more than the number who live in Weyburn — who moved to Alberta from Saskatchewan last year. Alberta is bursting at the seams with people moving there, while Saskatchewan continues to lose the interprovincial migration war.
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While it’s awfully neighbourly for Saskatchewan to offer up its education system to train students so they can work in Alberta, this serves as a distraction from the crisis in learning in this province.
The Programme for International Student Assessment scores of 15-year-olds in Saskatchewan in key subjects like math, reading and science suffered some of the steepest declines in Canada from 2018 to 2022 and were already below the national averages.
Saskatchewan ranked second-worst in math and third-worst in reading among provinces in the 2022 scores.
The government that is now serving up oil and gas training as part of the educational curriculum is probably counting on a more poorly educated population to buy its depiction of the industry’s importance.
If people lack strong math or reading skills, they can’t figure out how few people oil and gas employs here, or the vital role oil industry donations play for the governing party.
Phil Tank is the digital opinion editor at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
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