It has been said before in this space, and I will say it again: had the Sask Party not frittered away the money in good times, and had actually set aside a rainy-day fund as was recommended to them early in their first term, we would not be faced with the mean-spirited budget delivered last week.
They commissioned Peter McKinnon to recommend a course of action to ensure that the revenue from resources would serve us well into the future. He came up with a modest plan, but they ignored it. And now we all reap the consequences.
This is the fifth Brad Wall budget in nine that shows red ink. And this from a conservative, presumably business-like government. During their tenure, they not only spent every cent of resource revenue they could, but they spent nearly $2 billion that the province had in reserves.
So now we are asked to agree to higher consumption taxes (PST, which hurt lower-income families) and lower corporate and personal income tax rates (which benefit those who are better off financially).
We are asked to agree to the government not paying for funerals for those receiving social benefits. How uncharitable is that? We are asked to agree to cuts in funding for adult basic education, trade training, universities, and apprenticeship programs that are intended to provide us with the work force of the future. How dumb is that?
We are asked to agree to funding cuts to libraries. We are asked to shoulder more of the cost of education, even while school funding is being cut back.
And we may well have to pay more in local property taxes because the surcharge on SaskPower and SaskEnergy bills that went to cities is no longer going to them. I’m okay with that if the municipal surcharge comes off the bills and I end up paying it directly to the city. But we are dreaming in technicolour if we think that’s going to happen.
You can bet that the province will still be collecting that money, but it will disappear into that big black hole called the general revenue fund.
We are asked to agree that doing away with the STC bus service is a good idea. But did they make any effort to find alternate solutions involving the private sector, in the hope that this public transportation service could continue in some form?
In all of this, there are two glaring omissions that could have helped resolve some of the financial shortfall, but which were not part of this exercise in nasty and narrow-minded budgeting.
The rural municipalities, all 296 of them, were not told to amalgamate and look for the efficiencies that could flow from that. It is ludicrous that we have that many rural local governments, each with their own reeve and councillors and administrations, some with fewer than a couple hundred residents.
Twice a year they all go to conventions, some 2,000 RM representatives, for three or four days in Regina or Saskatoon. Paid for by the taxpayers, you can bet. Do the math on what that costs.
And the PST, now at 6%, is still not charged on most farm equipment and agricultural inputs. If you start a small business in Saskatchewan, you pay PST on all the equipment you buy to make your business go. Been there, done that. Not if you farm. Go figure.
And then go figure how much that could put into the provincial coffers. Farmers in Saskatchewan in 2014 spent about $10 billion to run the farm. Let’s say a very modest one-quarter of that -- $2.5 billion – was spent on equipment and inputs not subject to PST. The sales tax on that would bring in $150 million.
If we are going to get back on our financial feet, this government needs to be prepared to slay some political sacred cows.
Will they? Good luck with that. Brad Wall got his political feet wet in the Devine government, and is following in the same footsteps.
He used taxpayers’ money in the early 1990s to bring a country music museum to Swift Current. It went bankrupt four years later. Déjà vu.
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