Exploring the tunnels beneath Saskatchewan’s Legislative Building

Hollywood has done a lot for tunnels.

They’ve been a way for prisoners to dig their way to freedom. Secret passages for spies. A shortcut nobody was supposed to find.

Places where treasure hunters disappear into the darkness and emerge several minutes later, covered in dust, holding something they absolutely should not have touched.

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So when Steve Bata opens a conversation with, “Let’s talk tunnels,” it’s tempting to expect a grand reveal.

Bata is the building manager for the Saskatchewan Legislative Building. He knows this place better than almost anyone else, and he has no interest in building suspense.

“There are tunnels under the Leg building and the buildings in the precinct,” he said bluntly.

Above ground, it’s an idyllic park. Below, there is a network of tunnels holding pipes and wiring that are essential for the Saskatchewan Legislative Building to function. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

Well, there it is. The tunnels are real.

And according to Bata, there are a lot of them.

“We’ve probably got a kilometre of tunnels in the park.”

Listen to this Saskatchewan Story:

A kilometre! This is starting to sound promising.

But then Bata brings everyone back to earth.

“They’re utility tunnels. It’s not the romantic story of other tunnels,” he said. “It’s more to keep the buildings functional.”

One small set of steps leads you from the grand Saskatchewan Legislative Building into an underground maze of tunnels. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

Saskatchewan’s underground world isn’t hiding treasure.

It’s carrying steam and wires.

Bata delivered the information with the calm efficiency of someone explaining where the spare furnace filters are kept.

Which, in fairness, is more or less the point.

A kilometre of tunnels. Zero treasure

The Legislative Building is designed to impress from above.

The dome. The marble. The columns.

The enormous rooms built to make a young province look like it meant business.

The tunnels were built for a much less glamorous reason.

Behind the Legislative Building is the Powerhouse, a brick building that supplies utilities to the precinct.

“All the heating, cooling, utilities come from the powerhouse,” Bata explained.

The Regina Powerhouse was built in 1920. It supplies utilities to a number of buildings in Wascana Park through underground tunnels. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

The tunnels carry those necessities from building to building.

They are, essentially, the underground plumbing and wiring of the legislative precinct.

They’re also still working.

“We use them every day,” Bata said.

The Regina Powerhouse has been supplying utilities to the Saskatchewan Legislative Building for more than a century. (Submitted)

Above ground, politicians are busy making laws and making headlines.

Below, steam is moving through the pipes that keep it all going.

Take away the steam, and Saskatchewan’s politics gets considerably colder.

Even tunnels have an expiry date

The tunnels beneath the Legislative Building aren’t all the same.

In fact, there are two generations of them.

“The original one has been decommissioned and sealed,” Bata said. “You can’t get into it.”

The old system had simply reached the end of its useful life.

“The tunnels were starting to fail,” he explained.” They were starting to take on water.”

So the province got to digging.

“Being the age of the tunnels, the condition and the needs of the buildings, that would be why a new one was built in like 1979, ’78.”

There are some tight spaces in the tunnels. That’s just one of the reasons Bata said this wouldn’t be an ideal route for politicians to take to and from work each day. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

It’s not exactly the stuff of a thriller, but the original tunnels did come with their own bit of lore.

“There used to be three or four houses behind the Leg building,” Bata said. “We had a full-time park superintendent, or the powerhouse chief who actually lived in those houses. And they could get into the old tunnel.”

For the kids growing up there, the tunnel was less infrastructure and more irresistible temptation.

“There was a good book by somebody who lived in those, and they talked about as a kid that they would go in the tunnel,” Bata noted.

That may be the closest thing Saskatchewan has to a tunnel adventure story.

Not spies. Not escaped prisoners.

Just kids, turning a dark utility tunnel into something far more exciting than it was ever designed to be.

Sorry, no secret bunker

Bata has heard his fair share of speculation about what is buried beneath the building.

“They think we have, you know, a secret bunker or something in part of the tunnels,” he laughed.

He says the underground world beneath the legislature was never designed to be mysterious.

It was designed to be useful.

And it still is.

“We do inspections weekly, if not more,” Bata said.

You can’t just dig a tunnel and forget it. Bata said the tunnels are inspected at least weekly to ensure there are no issues. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

The checks are mostly visual, but engineers are brought in when needed to care for the myriad utilities held within the tunnels.

“They deliver a lot of things now, from high-pressure steam to cooling to communication lines to electrical,” he explained.

And that high-pressure steam comes with its own set of rules. Anyone going down there needs to know what they’re doing.

“You have to be careful. You have to have certain qualifications,” he emphasized. “We do a lot of work on our safety and our security.”

In other words, this isn’t a tunnel you simply wander into because you’re curious.

A tunnel with a job to do

The Legislative Building is so grand and eye catching that it can be easy to forget it’s a massive, functioning piece of infrastructure.

Bata sees that side of it every day.

For him, the tunnels aren’t an attraction. They’re part of the job.

Working in an underground tunnel may sound mysterious and fun, but Bata said there are some serious safety measures taken. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

For everyone else, though, there’s something pretty wonderful about knowing that beneath the marble, columns and impressive rooms, there’s a kilometre of tunnels that few people have ever entered.

Even so, Bata doesn’t romanticize any of it.

“Andy isn’t making it out one day and popping his head up into the middle of the field or anything and running off to Zihuatanejo, waiting for Red,” he laughed. “It would be a better story if it was.”

Fair enough.

These aren’t your average ‘dug through a prison wall with a tiny rock hammer’ tunnels. They’re made of concrete and tall enough to comfortably stand in. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

In The Shawshank Redemption, a tunnel is the road to freedom.

Under the Saskatchewan Legislative Building, it’s a road for steam.

These tunnels don’t exist because somebody dreamed up a great adventure.

They exist because Saskatchewan needed to keep the lights on, the buildings warm and the province’s machinery running.

And they are still down there, doing exactly that.