Nobody yelled out, "Saskatchewan, are you ready to rock?" at Saturday's SaskRocks investment conference, but most in attendance believe the province is ready to massively expand its mining sector.
Saskatchewan recently passed Ontario as the No. 1 mineral producer in Canada, and yet some still believe it's North America's last resource frontier.
"It's an odd thing to say since we're the largest mineral producer in Canada," said North 49 Resource Fund Inc. president and CEO Tom MacNeill.
He told "The Saskatchewan Story" to a crowd of investors, commodities experts and junior mining and exploration companies who converged on the Sheraton Cavalier Hotel to hear the mineral resource gospel.
Organized by Vancouver-based investor conference specialists Cambridge House International, SaskRocks hosted a day of speeches and roundtables with junior companies trying convince investors to part with their cash.
The province grabbed the mining crown from Ontario by accounting for 21.5 per cent of the $9.7 billion in Canadian mineral production.
With the lowest unemployment rate in North America, the strongest economic growth in Canada and a string of governments that encouraged resource development, Saskatchewan is ripe for capital investment, said MacNeill.
"The world understands that Saskatchewan has everything China craves," said MacNeill, referencing the world's fastest-growing economy, which buys much of Saskatchewan's potash.
"People say we're the breadbasket -- and we still are -- but we're also the world's shopping cart for everything else."
Before the current commodity boom, Saskatchewan wasn't encouraging private investment on the scale of other provinces, he added.
In the 1970s, Crown corporations like SaskOil and PotashCorp sterilized the capital markets and slowed capital investment down to a crawl, said MacNeill, a self-described "right-wing, private industry capitalist."
"Investors ran from the province like it was on fire," he said. "That left us with an economic hangover."
And it took several decades before the province recovered, he added, with recent NDP governments being more pragmatic about the natural resource industry and setting the course for the current boom.
"(Saskatchewan Party Premier) Brad Wall took the baton and ran with it, hard," said MacNeill.
Although Saskatchewan is now an investor's heaven, the capital markets are still small, so companies competing for more investment dollars often go to other provinces to raise cash for mining projects.
In 2008, Canadian companies spent $430 million on mineral exploration in Saskatchewan. The province is home to 27 producing mines.
But Saskatchewan is still without a significant capital market to invest in small and big mining projects.
If a company in Vancouver invests in a Saskatchewan project, and profits on the shares when the project is successful, that money leaves the province and is less likely to be reinvested or spent locally, said MacNeill.
"It's our own fault because we're not investing in our resources," he said. Investors from larger provinces aren't taking advantage of Saskatchewan's lack of private investment, because "we hardly put up any of the money, anyway," said MacNeill.
Most provinces have a local stock exchange that encourages private investment, but since a succession of governments in Saskatchewan didn't encourage private investment, the province is still behind despite having the strongest provincial economy, he said.
But even Alberta faltered and the government entered into deficit spending this year, despite its bullish attitude toward developing its massive oil sector.
The frenzy there has somewhat cooled down and now the province is facing its own economic hangover.
But don't expect a frenzy in Saskatchewan anytime soon. "We need to do the basic stuff first before we get anxious about going overboard, said MacNeill.