Premier should resign or call election on budget
In a recent column, I talked about the need to follow two principles when budgeting for tough times in the province. The first was to ensure that you didn’t do long-term damage to the infrastructure or the economy of the province, and the second was to protect the most vulnerable.
The budget released by the provincial government last week violates both of those principles. Moreover, it violates the trust that the people of Saskatchewan put in this government when they reelected them less than a year ago.
Where to begin? There are so many missteps that it is difficult in a short space to identify them all.
The elimination or massive reductions to basic infrastructures like parks, both urban and rural, libraries, STC services, pasture programs, as well as cuts to programs for students, health services, and education will all cause long-term damage to the basic infrastructure of the province. Decisions like these should only be undertaken in the most dire of emergencies, such as in the period between 1991 and 1995 when the province of Saskatchewan faced bankruptcy again after years of overspending by the Devine government.
However, it is on the second principle, protecting the most vulnerable, where this budget is most unacceptable. The massive shift from income based taxes to consumption taxes may please some economists but it will hurt lower-income farmers and working people in the province the most. Low-income people spend every dollar on necessary services and the increase in the PST and the elimination of many of the exemptions will hit them the hardest. Most importantly, the manifestly unfair increase in consumption taxes at a time when corporate and individual income taxes are being reduced, with the wealthiest getting the greatest reduction, is simply unconscionable. For goodness sakes, the provincial government has even decided that they can no longer afford to bury low-income people properly after they die. Shame!
The 2017 budget has broken the trust given the Saskatchewan Party in the election last spring. This is now a government that got elected under false pretences. They concealed the true state of the province’s finances, and they hid from the electorate the measures they now plan to use to deal with the debacle of their own making. None of the major changes in taxation, elimination of infrastructure, or cuts to low income programs were outlined during the last election campaign.
For the breaking of this trust, Premier Wall needs to either resign or call another election now and campaign on this budget.
Howard Leeson was a deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs in both the Blakeney and Romanow provincial administrations. He is currently an adjunct professor and professor emeritus of political science at the University of Regina.