Lloydminster

Lloydminster occupies a singular place in Canadian politics as a border city straddling the Alberta-Saskatchewan provincial line. The Saskatchewan side of the constituency has been represented by Saskatchewan Party MLA Colleen Young since she won a by-election in November 2014. Now seeking a fourth term, Young entered the 2024 campaign as a veteran legislator who had recently been elevated to cabinet, appointed Minister of Advanced Education in May 2024. The riding's economy is tightly bound to the heavy oil industry, with Cenovus Energy operating both the Lloydminster Upgrader and the Lloydminster Asphalt Refinery in the community.

Candidates

Colleen Young (Saskatchewan Party) — Young grew up on a family farm east of Saskatoon and has called Lloydminster home for nearly four decades. She studied at the University of Saskatchewan's College of Education and went on to serve twenty years as a trustee on the Lloydminster Public School Board, chairing the board for sixteen of those years. Her community involvement spans the Kiwanis Club, the Prairie North Regional Health Board, and the Lloydminster Learning Council, and she founded the Lloydminster In Motion After School Program and helped establish the Lloydminster Community Youth Centre. She was acclaimed as the Saskatchewan Party candidate for 2024.

Adam Tremblay (NDP) — Tremblay is a middle and high school teacher from Paradise Hill who holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Education from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. He has taught a wide range of subjects, from industrial arts and social studies to science, and has led numerous extracurricular programs. He cited a decade of witnessing what he described as chronic underfunding of education as the catalyst for his decision to enter politics.

Joshua Bloom (Saskatchewan United Party) — Bloom comes from a family farm near Turtleford. After studying music and audio production at a college in Sydney, Australia, he returned to Saskatchewan and worked in the oil and gas industry before completing a fourth-class power engineering certification at Lakeland College.

Local Issues

The heavy oil sector rebounded during the 2020–2024 term after the devastating price collapse that had defined the previous election cycle. Production in the Lloydminster field trended upward through 2021 and 2022, and investment by major operators like Cenovus and Strathcona Resources brought renewed drilling activity to the region. Strathcona alone allocated 450 million dollars of its 2024 budget to the Lloydminster area. However, the recovery remained vulnerable to commodity price swings, and the industry's long-term outlook was clouded by federal emissions reduction targets and the prospect of net-zero policies that the Saskatchewan United Party in particular warned would devastate the oil and gas sector.

Lloydminster's unique border-city status continued to create jurisdictional complexities. Residents on the Saskatchewan side experienced different provincial tax and regulatory regimes from their Alberta neighbours, and the absence of a provincial sales tax in Alberta remained a source of frustration for Saskatchewan-side businesses competing for consumer dollars. The Saskatchewan United Party's pledge to cut the PST to three per cent and eliminate the gas tax found a receptive audience in a community acutely aware of cross-border disparities.

Healthcare access was a recurring concern, particularly the challenge of recruiting and retaining physicians and nurses in a mid-sized community that competes with larger Alberta centres for healthcare professionals. Young, drawing on her years of involvement with regional health governance, positioned herself as a voice for the community's needs within a government that was investing heavily in health human resources recruitment but still struggling to fill vacancies in communities outside Saskatoon and Regina.