Moe’s Liberal bashing on equalization provides province nothing

At some point, Premier Scott Moe has to stretch Saskatchewan Party government policy beyond finding excuses to pick fights with the federal Liberals.

This is not to say there isn’t legitimacy in Moe’s argument against federal Liberal carbon pricing, as he demonstrated Wednesday in Saskatchewan’s submission of 11 projects for the federal government’s Low-Carbon Economy Fund.

Nor is it to suggest Moe shouldn’t ensure Saskatchewan has its say as B.C.’s NDP government blocks Kinder Morgan’s already approved Trans Mountain pipeline, given the project has an indirect effect in moving this province’s commodities to port.

But it is to say that being Saskatchewan premier is about more than political battles with Ottawa. And Moe’s attempt to reinvent Saskatchewan’s long-standing grievances with the federal equalization formula as some new problem foisted upon us by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals offers nothing.

In fact, Moe’s argument for reopening the equalization fight was as politically motivated as it was embarrassingly illogical.

If Saskatchewan has an equalization beef with Ottawa today, it’s the exact same fight it had more than a decade ago when former NDP premier Lorne Calvert, then-Sask. Party opposition leader Brad Wall and every single Conservative MP in Saskatchewan joined forces to urge Liberal prime minister Paul Martin to remove non-renewable resources from the equalization formula.

Saskatchewan was losing $800 million a year — enough in a single year to buy 260 MRIs or build 26 four-lane bridges with cloverleafs, Conservative MP Brad Trost said in his spring 2005 newsletter. Wall added at the time: “The Saskatchewan Party believes any new equalization formula should not penalize Saskatchewan for having natural resources.”

Soon-to-be-elected federal Conservative leader Stephen Harper would make removing non-renewable resource revenues from equalization a 2006 campaign platform campaign.

Then funny things began to happen: Seeing this would affect the Quebec vote, the Conservatives quickly became disinterested in committing $800 million a year to 14 seats in Saskatchewan.

Wall, once he became premier, began suggesting he could negotiate a better-than-$800-million-ayear deal with the Harper government outside equalization. When it was clear that wasn’t about to happen, Wall began arguing a “have” province like Saskatchewan shouldn’t be striving to be a “have-not” province.

Wall then seemingly put an end to the issue by pulling the plug on Calvert’s equalization constitutional challenge because it was deemed “unwinnable” and testily decreeing in July 2008, “I’m not having this debate again.”

Well it’s now 10 years later, the Liberals are back in and Moe seems more than eager to have “this debate again” ... albeit in a manner defying logic or reason.

Moe tweeted Tuesday “have” provinces like B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan get zero from equalization, yet “have-nots” like Quebec will get $11.7 billion in 2018-19. By Tuesday’s question period, Moe was demanding reopening the equalization file because of the carbon tax and Trans Mountain.

“We’re being restricted with our economy here in the province of Saskatchewan,” Moe told reporters.

While claiming this wasn’t retaliatory or political, Moe added: “I would put forward that one province attempting to block access (for oil exports) … is political in nature.”

Seriously? Accepting there are legitimate equalization concerns, how does the Saskatchewan government intend to now address them? What are the “simple fixes” in the complex equalization formula Moe referred to Tuesday that have somehow escaped everyone else for decades? How do we even begin this conversation without opening up negotiations to a constitutional debate and the inevitable Quebec question?

Does the Sask. Party government view this as a serious policy matter?

Or is this simply about looking for another fight with the federal Liberals?