MLA Hindley pleased with provincial budget

Newly elected Swift Current MLA Everett Hindley is voicing his approval for the province’s 2018-2019 provincial budget.

Hindley said the budget put forward by Minister of Finance Donna Harpauer is the second budget in a three year plan aiming to get the province back to balanced budgets.

“The 2018-2019 budget keeps that plan on track. For this upcoming budget year we’re looking at a budgeted deficit of $365 million. But what’s important is you look at for next years budget, and again it’s a three year plan, is that for 2019-20 we’re looking at a modest surplus of about $6 million, and then higher surpluses after that,” he said after the delivery of the budget last week.

He said Saskatchewan’s resource revenue has declined significantly as a result of lower oil and lower potash prices, making for some difficult decisions to meet this shortfall. Their budget initiatives are also intended to move Saskatchewan away from a dependance on resource revenues and to focus more on consumption based revenues and taxes.

“Last year when we embarked on this three year plan, the reason we did that and we made some tough decisions and this year’s the same thing too - we wanted to get away from resource revenue and volatile resource revenues being the source of the bulk of the budget. It’s important to point out I think that resource revenues budget to account for 10 per cent of total revenue in this the 20182019 budget. And that’s pretty significant because it’s at 10 per cent, whereas in 2008-2009 we were as high as 32 per cent of provincial government revenue came from renewable resources.”

Hindley was also pleased the budget held the line on taxes and did not contain increases to sales tax, property tax or income tax rates. Plus there is also not a carbon tax in the budget.

“What we think this does is it helps support a strong and growing economy. There’s some investments that have been made into some key areas.”

Hindley was happy to see the province follow through with a restoration of $30 million to the education system, with the province now spending $1.87 billion for school woperating funding.

“The Premier talked about earlier this winter about his commitment to education funding, and that was reaffirmed in the budget today, the $30 million increase over last year which will impact the Chinook and the Holy Trinity School Divisions. Our critics will say that that’s not enough. But what we’re saying is that’s a start. It recognizes what people have been telling us about focussing more on education. So we’re working on that.”

The full article on Hindley’s reaction appears at swbooster.com.