Jeremy Cockrill

Jeremy Cockrill is Saskatchewan's Finance Minister. The province has real resource wealth — potash, oil, agriculture. There's no reason Saskatchewan families should be struggling the way they are with the cost of groceries, utilities, and rent in the cities. But they are. Rural hospitals are understaffed. Schools are stretched. The government that Cockrill is part of has spent a lot of energy fighting Ottawa over the carbon tax. That's fine as far as it goes. But the provincial choices about where to spend the province's own money haven't been good enough for the people at the bottom of the income scale. The resources exist. The will to use them differently hasn't been there.

Jeremy Cockrill is Saskatchewan's Finance Minister. Saskatchewan's economy has strong fundamentals — potash, oil, agriculture. There should be money for public services that actually reach regular people. But what I hear from people there is the same story as everywhere else: groceries up, utilities up, rent up in the cities, rural services getting cut. Provincial finances are one thing. What families experience day-to-day is another. A Finance Minister's job is to make government resources work for people — all people, not just business. The government he serves has made choices that didn't prioritize affordability enough and the budget should reflect what families actually need.

Jeremy Cockrill was the subject of two separate conflict of interest investigations in 2024 — and the province's Conflict of Interest Commissioner found that he had indeed breached the Conflict of Interest Act by maintaining connections to his company Fortress Windows and Doors while it received public contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Commissioner noted it was unintentional but still recommended a formal reprimand. On top of that, he made a deeply insensitive remark to a Saskatchewan mother whose child had died, comparing teacher salary demands to someone asking for his "firstborn child" — for which he had to publicly apologize in the Legislature. He also faced allegations from the Saskatchewan Teachers' Federation of lying about the state of bargaining during a period of significant labour disruption in the province's schools. This is not the record of someone exercising the judgment that a cabinet position demands.