Sask. Party changes hardly transformational

Initially, the Saskatchewan Party government’s plans for fiscal accountability sounded like a breath of fresh air.

With refreshing candour, Finance Minister Kevin Doherty announced on budget day that the year ahead would be spent examining “transformational change” in Saskatchewan.

Everything would have to be on the table, Doherty said on June 1.

And, demonstrating a willingness to put his money where his mouth was, Doherty rattled off an impressive list of Saskatchewan sacred cows that might be heading off to the abattoir, including: Can we still afford similar colleges at both major Saskatchewan universities? Do we truly need as many school and health boards as now exist?

It was refreshing candour — not just because candour is a rare commodity in politics, but because Doherty was talking about a big-picture view of problems that have evolved, but remained unaddressed.

For example, this province has historically subsidized agricultural producers to keep them on the land, but this has now evolved into heavily subsidizing (with our tax dollars) large-scale, multi-million-dollar businesses — whether they are family owned operations or corporate farms.

Doherty’s 2016-17 budget presents a rather impressive array of tax exemptions for farmers, including $83.8 million for farm machinery and repairs and $163.4 million for fertilizer, pesticides and equipment repairs.

Similarly, this year’s budget will offer $98.8 million in tax exemptions on light vehicle purchases, $13.4 million on children’s clothing and footwear and $84.2 million on restaurant meals and snack foods. So it’s clearly a case where we’ve evolved to a point where more than just financially fortunate farmers are benefiting from government policies we may no longer be able to afford.

Do well-to-do city consumers who eat out or grab what are generally considered to be unhealthy snacks need to be subsidized for things that are taxed in other provinces?

Admittedly, this Sask. Party government is loath to consider any tax increases. But in the spirit of a frank discussion on “transformational change” that Doherty was talking about, perhaps tax hikes need to be on the table, too.

That said, there are likely just as many non-essentials on the spending side of the government budget ledger that need to be explored like whether we still need a highly subsidized, governmentowned bus company, nearly 300 rural municipal governments or whether there are still savings in health delivery that might unfortunately, bring into question things like rural hospitals.

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since the last such spring cleaning — the NDP’s great purge of 52 rural hospitals and other cuts or increased taxation measures that were also driven by a structural deficit.

Alas, since Doherty made his bold pronouncement on budget day, little suggests that’s what his Sask. Party government is doing.

One of the intriguing things about this year — and this fall sitting — is that it was supposed to pique discussion over what those big changes mean.

One place where this is obviously occurring is SaskTel, where we are now having a hopefully productive debate over selling a highly profitable Crown to pay down debt. At the very least, this is a big idea. A SaskTel sale would be truly transformational.

But other transformational cost-cutting has targeted low-hanging fruit — comparatively small dollars in supposedly duplicate social assistance programs, money for homeless shelters and the $3.4 million Northern Teachers Education Program (NORTEP) aimed at a rather vulnerable constituency.

But is this really the “transformational change” we want? Do we buy new Advanced Education Minister Bronwyn Eyre’s explanation Wednesday that the real problem in Saskatchewan is the “inequity” of NORTEP students getting more financial aid than other students?

Or might we seriously consider ways to keep funding this 40-year successful program, which trains northerners in direct contact with those northern kids committing suicide? What about privately funded bursaries for NORTEP students from businesses which would get tax credits?

Might that be more of a transformational, biggerpicture approach than the $3-million government subsidy to Skip the Dishes?

We need to know what “transformational change” means — because it doesn’t appear to be what we thought it meant.