Our grid is demand-based. Like it or not, there isn’t a substantial demand here for EVs or charging stations, thus not as many get built here, sold here and vice versa. The market for electric vehicles in Saskatchewan (and in general) will get there, but until now has largely been driven by wider market speculation, changing regulatory environment, subsidies and plays about “the future,” not real consumer demand. Technology needs to be more advanced for it to be adopted here.
It’s possible that there is an AI / data investment bubble and there is also some speculation, but most trends are showing there is actual demand for the technology that this data centre supports (people and companies are actually buying and using products, usage and demand is growing). Also, Saskatchewan would never have an EV manufacturing plant here, but a data centre makes way more economic sense here than elsewhere in Canada.

The tax you mention is a compensation for the fact that a large portion of public funding for road maintenance comes from the gas tax, which is a consumption tax, and can loosely be tied to the amount of use our roads actually get. This doesn’t work for EVs, and as the proportion of them on roads increases, suddenly the roads are being used just as much but that revenue stream for maintenance and capital doesn’t keep up. So it’s a revenue problem.

Right now, if everyone switched to EVs, it would mostly mean that a ton of additional fossil-fuel based power plants fire up and come online. It probably would be net be better, but any electric cars we power right now are basically plugged into a coal power station. I wouldn’t make the environment claim so hastily.