Sask. Party government needs to focus on creating more jobs

Whether any provincial premier — especially one overseeing a province with a resource-based economy subject to the whims of world markets — can do much about lagging job growth is questionable.

But one might think Premier Scott Moe would want to shift his gaze from the carbon tax and the Trans Mountain Pipeline to the serious matter of kick-starting job creation.

Of course, to deal with Saskatchewan’s job-creation problems, Moe has to admit we have a job-creation problem. He is struggling to do that.

This doesn’t make Moe unique. One would be hard-pressed to find a Saskatchewan premier (or any premier, anywhere at any time) who freely admits such failings. But Moe’s recent eagerness to fudge the numbers to make them appear better than they are — something that flies in the face of his straight-shooter reputation — may be where the problem begins.

According to August employment numbers from Statistics Canada, Saskatchewan increased total jobs by 1,200 compared with August 2017 — a pittance compared with the 33,000

July year-over-year increase in Alberta. In reality, Saskatchewan’s is a comparatively small 12-month increase — practically job-growth stagnation.

However, this didn’t stop Moe from focusing on the ( barely) more pleasing full-time job numbers (a modest 2,800-job increase) and boastfully suggesting Saskatchewan is doing better because of the nationwide loss of 51,000 jobs.

Admittedly, the monthly numbers game is played by all sides. Oppositions are equally guilty of applying their own spin by exclusively focusing on the most negative numbers they can find each month.

On Friday, the NDP Opposition put out a news release that didn’t even bother to acknowledge the uptick in overall employment and instead focused on “Saskatchewan’s unemployment rate has climbed to 7.4 per cent.”

Nevertheless, the NDP’S concerns over the longer-term trend seems to be closer to reality — a reality that did see an oil/resource-driven boom in Saskatchewan that started about 2005 and ended more than two years ago. Since then, there has been barely any job growth here — something that isn’t going unnoticed by those outside the province. As Calgarybased economist Todd Hirsch observed, there is now significant migration from Saskatchewan to Alberta because people again seem to be moving west in search of better jobs. About the only thing different now than what we’ve seen in the past is Saskatchewan’s new-found ability to attract new Canadians, who are doing more than their part to ward off population loss.

But even this reality has quickly become bogged down in politics. Those unwilling to accept what the stark numbers are showing claim massive public spending by Alberta’s NDP government is creating more publicsector jobs at the cost of deficit budgets and added debt.

While Alberta’s economy may be losing lower-paying jobs in areas like the service and hospitality industry (perhaps due to that province’s minimum wage hike and subsequent adjustments to full- and part-time employment), it is gaining goodpaying oil and other privatesector jobs. Alberta public-sector jobs are about the same — overall, a pretty solid scenario.

What job increases there have been in Saskatchewan these past two years have trended towards part-time, lower-paying servicesector jobs. And it’s possible even those jobs are now disappearing.

With the Sask. Party government doing things like insisting on a 3.67-per-cent remuneration reduction to teachers, it certainly has been padding the job stats with public-sector hirings. However, by pumping billions into capital spending projects like the Regina bypass, we may face worsening numbers when government money for those construction jobs runs out.

Moe’s government needs a better strategy — one that acknowledges the uncertainties of oil and resource employment and helps move our economy to other areas that produce better-paying jobs.

It’s a Herculean task — one that the Saskatchewan premier might not be able to address. But he needs to try, and that begins by first acknowledging we have a job-creation problem.