Regina Saskatchewan - At a time when Saskatchewan feels like it's flying apart at the seams, we may have just rediscovered what's historically bonded us together.
 
What may that be, you ask?
 
Our love of flat, open spaces?
 
Believe it or not, not all Saskatchewanians are enamoured with living 365 days a year in cold, barren flatness, which is why we escape to Arizona's warm, barren flatness.
 
The Riders?
 
You're more likely to find an agoraphobic in Saskatchewan than someone who will openly admit to not being a Rider fan.
 
But not everyone cares about football.
 
Our love of farming and farmers?
 
Maybe, don't get city people going on their true feelings toward today's farmers.
 
The weather?
 
No.
 
But there has always been one force that was messing with Saskatchewan even before Day One on 1 Sep 1905.
 
Evidently, it continues to mess with us to this very day.
 
The Canadian Pacific Railway.
 
The damn CPR.
 
From many peoples, strength?
 
Nope.
 
Our provincial motto should really be, Multis e gentibus, rancidus CPR.
 
Rich.
 
Poor.
 
Rural.
 
Urban.
 
Left.
 
Right.
 
Country, rock or rap.
 
New Canadian.
 
First Nation.
 
Old stock.
 
Throughout our history, there has been nothing quite so unifying in this landlocked province as our collective disdain for this national railway.
 
So consider how absolutely glorious it is in these troubled times of division and anger to be brought together by the collective repulsion over a CP lawsuit saying it should never ever have to pay a dime of taxes to the province.
 
Through a fantastic story by Leader-Post legislative reporter Arthur White-Crummey, we learned this week that CP is suing the Saskatchewan government for $341 million because it feels a 141-year-old contract with the Canadian government means it is exempt from paying provincial taxes.
 
How earth-shattering is this story in Saskatchewan?
 
Well, for the briefest of moments, an entire province stopped saying "Damn Trudeau."
 
Lawyers for CP argued in Regina's Court of Queen's Bench this week that an 1880 contract incorporated in the 1881 CPR Act exempts the corporation from any provincial income, sales, fuel, and capital taxes associated with its historic main line.
 
While CP has paid this unconstitutional tax for a century, it, generously, is suing only to recoup taxes paid since 2002.
 
Most of the above is written tongue in cheek, but shelling out a third of billion dollars will have what Finance Minister Donna Harpauer described as "significant" impact on a provincial budget already struggling with pandemic costs and growing public debt.
 
"It's unfair to the taxpayers of the province, because then they have to bear the brunt," Harpauer told White-Crummey.
 
The court will now weigh both the tax law and constitutional complexity (the 1905 Saskatchewan Act required adherence to the CPR Act), but just as interesting is the not-so-dormant collective animosity the suit has stirred up in Saskatchewan's court of public opinion.
 
Truly, this is something only the CP could do.
 
"The irony is that they hate the CP, but pretty much every town in southern Saskatchewan exists because of the railroads," said Craig Baird, podcaster and historian who produced a series this summer on how the railroads developed Canada.
 
Baird, a former reporter with the Leader-Post, agreed the animosity toward CP was spawned by the rather generous 25 million acres granted by the Canadian government that accompanied the tax exemptions, but it goes beyond this.
 
It was the railway's absolute power that dictated where towns would be located and what they would be named followed by decades of control over everything from communities shipping out their wheat to getting their mail that's defined the relationship.
 
It's a historical reminder this province has always encountered shared difficulties, problems we've gotten past through consensus and collective response.
 
If this lawsuit can remind us of the importance of that, God bless CP.
 
Murray Mandryk.