Conservative MP for Cypress Hills Jeremy Patzer oversees a number of R.Ms that stood to benefit from the Keystone XL pipeline project.

While not having nearly the economic impact in the province as it obviously would have in Alberta, there were nonetheless jobs in construction, maintenance and service that would have spanned across the southwest as the pipeline made its way to the United States border.

With the final pullout of TC Energy, the company behind the project, the Keystone XL project is officially DOA however. Something that Patzer pins squarely on government inaction.

The Keystone XL pipeline would have run through numerous R.M.s on its way to the Montana border."It was one of those things where we saw the American president on his first day revoke the permit on the American side, and just the lack of effort that was given by the federal government on the Canadian side. I think that most people just saw the writing on the wall. But for myself and a few of my colleagues, we took it upon ourselves to request emergency debates and do what we could to fight for the project, but governments in Canada and the U.S. both wanted to see it cancelled and they got their wish."

Opponents to the Keystone XL pipeline on both sides of the border cited the project's potential environmental impact.

Although TC Energy made the claim that the project would end up being net-zero for emissions, critics cited the company's track record with its existing Keystone pipeline system, which has seen four breaks since beginning operation in 2010, the most recent in 2019 when 383,000 gallons of crude oil spilled in North Dakota.

Patzer however feels that much of the pressure here in the north came from a general push against the Alberta oil sands.

Pushback to the oil sands is nothing new, however. Opponents say oil sands extraction releases three times as much pollution as traditional oil extraction due to the energy cost of the steam injection process or strip mining. Patzer disagrees.

"There has been a general push I think from a lot of groups to try to stall and basically end any development in the oil sands But they do a great job up there of being responsible with the land and doing it in as equitable a way as they possibly can."

As mentioned, the economic impact will likely not be felt as strongly in the southwest as it will in the oil sands themselves. And while Saskatchewan has worked hard at diversification in the last number of years to decrease its dependence on the oil industry, Patzer says that for now the need isn't going away and says that transitioning to the renewable energy sector isn't a simple task.

"The government keeps talking about how they want to set up transition funding for people to get retraining and different things like that. They think that they can just go work in the renewable energy sector. But it's just not as cut and dried as that. The world's energy demands are only going to be going up and the need for fossil fuels is still there and will be for the next decade or two. So it just made sense to make a project like this work and make it happen."