Premier’s policy reversals not all that they seem

Little being done to fix the damage already inflicted

The costs of Wall’s obsession with privatization are becoming more obvious...

Over the past week, Premier Brad Wall has made clear that his final months in office will be spent trying to reverse the public’s rightly deteriorating view of his actions while in power.

Wall has declared sudden changes from two of the most significant decisions made over the last year — providing nothing by way of a plausible explanation as to how he was so thoroughly out of touch in the first place.

But we should be careful about allowing spin to trump substance in evaluating Wall’s final session. And his announcements themselves correct far less than might seem to be the case at first glance.

It would be a significant plus if Wall genuinely intended to reverse his government’s choice to hand money to the corporate sector in a budget which contained nothing but austerity for everybody else. But Wall’s announcement last week that the government won’t proceed with announced changes to the corporate tax rate reflects something else entirely.

When the public reacted with outrage at the prospect of freebies for Wall’s corporate cronies in the midst of an austerity budget, the problem wasn’t merely how the corporate giveaways were structured. Instead, the contrast was between a province full of citizens who were told everybody had to share in fiscal pain, and a business sector which was gifted tens of millions of dollars for no apparent reason — regardless of what form that gift took.

That contrast has only been emphasized by Wall’s new announcement that the money originally earmarked to be forfeited in corporate tax rate reductions will instead be redirected toward some other business-related giveaway. Under the guise of “(needing) to find a place for that money,” the Saskatchewan Party is now going far out of its way to search for some excuse to funnel it to the corporate sector — without any apparent regard for alternative options.

Any reasonable government would consider the prospect of using the retained revenue to reduce our province’s deficit — or better yet to improve the lives of Saskatchewan’s residents, including by reversing some of the cuts imposed by the Saskatchewan Party’s budget. But those apparently don’t even register as possibilities for someone as far removed from the general public’s reality as Wall.

Meanwhile, Wall’s announcement about legislation to repeal Bill 40’s sneak attack on Saskatchewan’s Crown corporations might be entirely illusory unless a bill receives top legislative priority. The contents of a throne speech and the introduction of a bill won’t actually reverse the effects of Bill 40 — and a normal legislative timeline would see the new bill fall short of passing on Wall’s watch.

At the same time, the costs of Wall’s obsession with privatization are becoming more obvious by the day. With or without Bill 40, Wall has long taken every opportunity to sell off or outsource the functions of our Crowns, leaving us with fewer assets and larger liabilities. And news continues to emerge about the former liquor board retail locations being discarded for tiny fractions of the amount they formerly brought into public coffers — including the Watson store which brought in upwards of $1.1 million in sales every year, but was dumped for a mere $100,000.

In sum, while Wall remains as image-conscious as ever, he’s doing little to reverse the damage he’s inflicted on Saskatchewan even in the areas where he’s trying to rewrite history. And particularly as his would-be successors implicitly (or explicitly) endorse virtually every misstep and scandal, we can only see Wall’s attempt to gloss over the harm done by his party and government as too little too late.