HUGE SHORTFALL Buys LITTLE FOR THE PRESENT OR FUTURE

The Saskatchewan Party government does know we are in the middle of a worldwide pandemic and perhaps the worst economic crisis of our lifetime, doesn’t it?

The now official 2020-21 Saskatchewan budget with its $2.4-billion deficit — although Finance Minister Donna Harpauer’s plan actually goes to great pains to describe it as something other than that — outlines why we should consider this a grave situation.

Its severe numbers, one would think, should be meritorious of either a huge social spending response or a fiscal prudence reaction that would make the Saskatchewan NDP government budgets of the early 1990s or even the 2017 budget look like wild spending sprees.

But it didn’t really do either ... or, maybe better put, it attempted to do both and did both rather badly. And what’s most aggravating is that it likely could have picked either/or and gotten away with it in these forgiving times.

Austerity? How far out-of-touch would you have to be in today’s COVID-19 world to not understand that we’ve all had to tighten our belt cinches to get through these days.

Social programming? Heck, if ever there was a pre-election budget where government could have gotten away with grotesque spending, it was this one. Harpauer didn’t do that, but that’s not necessarily a good thing.

The great “pandemic budget” finally tabled after the informal presentation of spending estimates 90 days ago, seemed mostly misplaced cheery optimism, inappropriate frugality in areas where help is surely needed or foreboding numbers in declining natural resource revenues suggesting darker days ahead regardless of how much the Sask. Party tries to spin this mess.

“Saskatchewan is strong, our province’s fiscal foundation remains solid and our economy will recover,” Harpauer proclaimed in her main budget press release.

“This is a pandemic deficit, not a structural deficit.”

Huh? So if things are so great, why the hell aren’t we doing more to help people?

Well, one problem is that nowhere beyond the fertile imagination of government spin does this 2020-21 budget suggest we now have a solid foundation capable of stimulating the economy. Overall taxation revenue is $7.203 billion, conservatively estimated, $350 million less than last year and that’s only because of the lag in corporate income tax reporting (which actually increased $3.5 million, largely because 2019 was a better economic year that 2018).

Fuel tax is down $54 million, income tax is down $25 million, and provincial sales tax is down a whopping $209 million. And this is all based on the more middleof-the road budgeting models that don’t see Saskatchewan again being shut down by a second-wave of COVID-19 and averages just 13,800 loss jobs over the year.

In fact, every major economic indicator except food and beverage purchases paints an ugly picture in year-to-date comparisons: Retail sales down 2.5 per cent; food services and drinking place sales down 10.3 per cent; manufacturing sales down 12.2 per cent and; building construction down 23 per cent.

And these economic indicators that led the budget to predict a relatively optimistic 6.3-percent decline in the real gross domestic product (GDP) are a treat compared with the crash in the Saskatchewan budget’s still critical non-renewable resource numbers. That figure plummeted a remarkable $753 million — or 43 per cent from last year — largely as a result of a $493-million drop in oil (the assumption is US$30 a barrel) and natural gas revenue and an $80-million drop on potash revenue.

Asked why the budget had no name, Harpauer laughed that any names in her head were not fit for public consumption. Perhaps the day’s saving grace was Harpauer’s pleasant disposition, but even she struggled to apply lipstick to this pig of a budget.

Pushed by reporters on the 2020-21 budget’s reality, she acknowledged optimism about selling Saskatchewan fundamentals of fuel, farming and fertilizer are largely based on a world more quickly recovering from COVID -19 and buying our products.

That translates into no balanced budgets for the foreseeable future (at least the next two years) and maybe tax increases or public sector wage and hiring freezes if oil and other commodities don’t recover.

Ya think? Then-premier Brad Wall was demanding the public sector agree to a 3.5-per-cent reduction in compensation in some way — what would have likely been “Wallidays” in the form of an unpaid day off once a month — in 2017 for a budget with roughly half the deficit.

Yet this budget — one that will hike public debt to an astronomical $24.4 billion — took bizarre delight in noting its $1.1-billion spending increase to $16.1 billion.

The government claims this is largely due to what it described as $900 million more to fight COVID -19, including an extra $502 million since the March 18 spending estimates. Under the circumstances, one might see this is as a huge selling point, but provincial dollars actually trickling down to help people in need have been few and far between.

One gets that Harpauer, Premier Scott Moe, et. al. are facing a real-life nightmare in their spending choices and may not want to endure the criticism over those spending choices like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has with the unregulated Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB). But that Harpauer told reporters Monday that “I’m not feeling the pressure to go above and beyond what CERB is offering” seemed a strange response.

Really, the Sask. Party government has focused much of its pandemic spending on long-term capital investments in highways and elsewhere and had nothing in the budget but its miserly, already-announced initiatives.

Fifty bucks as a one-time-only COVID-19 payment to all people on social assistance? Consider for a moment how quickly you blow through $50 (i.e. you order in a pizza for the family with cheesy bread and a tip). Now consider how miserable life has been for those who didn’t have income before this mess — let alone, during.

So unless you are a big fan of incongruent messaging and budgets written on a wing and prayer that seem destined to accomplish nothing, there’s not much in the 2020-21 budget for you.

In the short term, there’s not much that is going to help you get through the COVID -19 crisis. In the long term, what you inevitably face is some form of budget reckoning once we are passed the Oct. 26 election date.

This is the largest deficit budget deficit in Saskatchewan history and that might have been forgivable under the crisis circumstances that both we and the government now find ourselves in.

What’s less forgivable is this may be one the most ill-conceived budget we’ve seen ... at least in a very long time.

Mandryk is the political columnist for the Regina Leader-post and Saskatoon Starphoenix

So if things are so great, why the hell aren’t we doing more to help people?