Sask. politics still weighted toward rural areas
It may surprise you how urban Saskatchewan has become ... and how its politics/ governance is still weighted toward the rural sector.
This is not to diminish the importance of the rural/ agricultural component of Saskatchewan’s makeup.
Rural life/small communities/agriculture isn’t just some heritage element that, like the three wheat sheaves on our coat of arms, reminds us of where we have come from. It remains a vital part of our culture and an even bigger part of today’s economy, as things like this week’s Farm Progress Show in Regina clearly demonstrate.
Simply put, we do need provincial government policies favouring rural Saskatchewan and agriculture, because they remain crucial to our existence.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t question why the 2018-19 Saskatchewan budget (presented by a government clearly still in austerity mode) would forgo $300 million in annual sales tax revenue this year by continuing an outright sales tax exemption on farm machinery, repair parts, fertilizers, pesticides and seed. With the large, corporate nature of today’s farming operations, there are valid reasons to at least explore this exemption policy.
That said, farming is as it’s always been — a business caught in the delicate balance of weather and commodity prices. For that reason, those who complain about Premier Scott Moe’s opposition to the federal Liberal government carbon tax need to talk to a farmer about how it would disproportionally hit agriculture.
By the same token, the dilemma of a widely dispersed, remote rural and northern population has made it necessary to have public Crown corporations for electrical and gas power, cellphone service and, yes, even public bus transportation to provide services in places where profit-driven private companies would fear to tread.
However, the fact is urban population growth is outdistancing rural growth — a big problem when it comes to electoral representation.
While the Sask. Party government last week cheered very good news that Saskatchewan’s population is now a record 1,171,240 people as of April 1, it didn’t mention that more than 80 per cent of the 157,806 new residents of the past decade have landed in Regina and Saskatoon.
Admittedly, this is just part of the decades-old trend that has seen agricultural mechanization and land prices/ input costs far exceed commodity prices so that farms have to get big just to survive.
Nevertheless, you would have to go back to the 1966 Canadian census to see a time when there were actually more “rural Saskatchewan residents (487,017) living on some 85,686 farms than there were “urban” residents (468,327). Fifty years later, the number of farms and the actual Saskatchewan farm population is close to a quarter of those numbers.
Yet we still need something just shy of 300 rural municipalities — close to the same number we had in 1905 — to govern them?
According to 2016 numbers, our 16 cities alone account for 629,233 of Saskatchewan’s people, so we aren’t even really a “small town” province anymore.
But let’s accept that the 5,000 residents one needs for Saskatchewan city status is rather generous and focus on the seven biggest cities: Saskatoon (246,366), Regina (215,106), Prince Albert (35,926), Moose Jaw (33,890), Yorkton (16,343), Swift Current (16,604) and North Battleford (14,315). That’s a total of 578,560. That’s half of Saskatchewan’s population.
Interestingly, these cities represent the only purely “urban” ridings — 30 of them (because Saskatoon-Stonebridge-Dakota has a large rural component and likely should not be called urban or rural).
The pendulum is swinging toward the cities in Saskatchewan ... except at the now 61-seat legislature in Regina.
Instead of adding three more MLAs prior to the 2016 election (even if all of their seats were in cities), the Sask. Party government needed to make the tough choice of actually reducing rural seats to reflect what the government’s own numbers are showing them about Saskatchewan’s population trending toward the cities.
This is a matter of fairness. Next election, the average city seat will have significantly more voters than the average rural seat. Democratically, this is untenable.
Rural/urban needs are always about balance, but governance issues need to be addressed.