Moe continues Sask. Party’s neglect of poor

Over the past 10 years, the cost of living in Saskatchewan has increased by more than 20 per cent. And that number may underestimate the prices that most affect low-income residents — who have faced higher consumption taxes, increased fees for basic services due to the downloading of costs onto municipalities and Crown corporations, and decreased services due to cutbacks.

But over the past 10 years, the basic social services benefit available for Saskatchewan’s low-income residents has increased by a grand total of … zero.

The monthly funding provided for individuals under the Saskatchewan Assistance Program remains a paltry $255 per month to cover all of a person’s food, personal, travel, household and clothing needs. And the provincial money available to pay rent is as low as $233, depending on an individual’s employability and location.

One might have expected a new premier taking a fresh look at the most urgent needs in the province, to pay some attention to how our lowincome neighbours have been left behind.

Instead, the most obvious movement in the 2018 budget is in the opposite direction.

Rather than taking even the slightest step to help many of the people who most need public support, Premier Scott Moe has decided to barge ahead with one of the plans that contributed to public backlash against the 2017 budget — putting an end to the availability of a rental supplement that offered people at least some prospect of finding a home in Saskatchewan’s larger cities.

And even more disturbingly, Moe is going so far as to claim credit for an increase in SAP costs resulting solely from a larger number of people who need social assistance — while offering no consideration at all to the gross insufficiency of the standard of living they’ll face.

And even as it has left our province’s poorest citizens to face the tide of increasing prices, the Saskatchewan Party has gone out of its way to create inflation protection in areas where there’s far less need for it.

In 2009, at the same time its reckless tax slashing carved a hole in the provincial budget that has yet to be repaired, the Wall government linked the province’s income tax structure to the national rate of inflation.

As a result, basic tax thresholds automatically adjust to increases in the cost of living. And even as it has continued to dig our province into an ever-deeper fiscal hole, the Saskatchewan Party has continued to trumpet how indexation has kept revenue out of public coffers.

To be clear, tax indexation may be an entirely reasonable idea in theory. Some income tax thresholds have a significant effect on some groups of relatively needy people. And even thresholds that apply equally to wealthier citizens — most notably the basic personal exemption and bracket levels — can reasonably be linked to inflation as a matter of fairness and personal stability.

But any recognition that people’s income and well-being shouldn’t deteriorate from year to year due to the systematic effects of inflation in our tax system is utterly incompatible with the Saskatchewan Party’s continuing choice to impose constantly increasing real costs of living on the people who have the least. And indeed, to the extent there’s a choice to be made, it would make far more sense to adjust the amount required for basic living expenses than to focus on upper-level tax brackets.

Unfortunately, Moe has chosen to stay on the same uncaring track laid down by Wall. And it still doesn’t seem to matter to the Saskatchewan Party that a growing number of people have been abandoned in the path of an oncoming train.

Over the past 10 years, the basic social services benefit

... for Saskatchewan’s low-income residents has increased by a grand total of … zero.