50 Weird Facts about Saskatchewan That You Should Know

Saskatchewan looks like a rectangle of wheat and flat horizon. That picture leaves out a meteor crater under a lake, a desert you can only reach by float plane, ten plants that grow nowhere else on Earth, the 23 days that handed a continent its healthcare system — and the man who built it, voted the greatest Canadian of all time, whom the RCMP secretly spied on for over thirty years. Here are 50 facts about Saskatchewan, all true, none of what you'd expect. In this video, we explore: → Scotty, the largest T. rex ever discovered, 13 metres long and over 28 years old — found eroding out of a hillside near a town of 500 people, after sitting in the ground for 66 million years → Lloydminster, a single city the provincial border was drawn straight through in 1905 — same block, different province, and residents on each side living under different provincial law → Little Manitou Lake, a closed basin five times saltier than the ocean, where the water holds you up like a cork — half the density of the Dead Sea, named by Indigenous peoples for "spirit" long before tourists arrived → The Crooked Bush near Hafford, a stand of aspen that bends, spirals, and grows sideways — with identical trees growing perfectly straight a few metres away, and UFO interference still formally on the list of explanations → Reindeer Lake's Deep Bay, the deepest point in the province, carved 100 million years ago by a meteor that punched into the ground during the age of dinosaurs → The Moose Jaw tunnels, used by Chinese railway workers hiding from the Head Tax decades before bootleggers turned the city into "Little Chicago" — and the persistent, unprovable rumour that Al Capone ran his Canadian operation from down there → Butch Cassidy's sandstone hideout in the Big Muddy Badlands, 12 miles from the border with carved stalls for stolen horses — positioned so American lawmen could see it but never legally reach it → The 23-day 1962 doctors' strike that nearly killed medicare in its cradle — 4,000 protesters outside the Regina legislature, communities that stopped speaking to each other, and a model the whole country later adopted And at number one: Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian healthcare and the man CBC viewers named the greatest Canadian ever — beating Gretzky, Terry Fox, and a sitting Trudeau. For more than thirty years the RCMP tracked his meetings and associations, including a 1970 conversation about Vietnam with Jane Fonda. The files came out in 2006, two decades after he died. His grandson, as it happens, is Kiefer Sutherland. Subscribe and turn on notifications — the next province is already stranger than you think. #GhostCanada #Saskatchewan #CanadianHistory #HiddenCanada #ForgottenPlaces #WeirdFacts #TommyDouglas #Scotty #PrairieHistory #WeirdCanada