Brad Wall Is Burning The Furniture To Heat The House

The Premier told us to expect an economic “shift”. That shift is about to hit the fan, and only fossil fuels and football are safe.

Ok, Brad. Time to fess up. We all understood that we would have to pitch our fair share to keep the lights on here in Saskatchewan. Times are tough. But the 2017 budget has revealed the truth of the province’s finances: that there is no longer any hope of keeping the lights on.

We’re in the dark, and now we’re burning the furniture to heat the house.

Some light has been made of this in the media already, mostly throwing around a lot of big numbers: $1,000,000,000 in tax increases; $685,000,000 in deficit spending; 574 government employees out of work so far. And a lot of big zeros where it counts: Zero new services. Zero accountability.

The wheels on the bus

Saskatchewan Transportation Company is done. Wall & Co kept swearing up and down they wouldn’t sell our Crowns, but this is clearly just another sell-off by another name. And a big one at that, with hundreds of thousands of people left out in the cold: commuters, post-secondary students, farmers shipping parts, clinics shipping blood, cancer patients needing care, others, and me, who bought tickets by the handful.

This comes as a huge shock because I long ago identified changes that could have been made to thin out STC, without coming close to eliminating the essential service of public transit. Wall is whining that keeping STC on the road would have cost $85 million over the next five years. It didn’t have to. So many times I was one of only a handful of passengers, on a short stretch, on a 55-seater bus. In another life, STC could have operated with a much smaller footprint by operating charter vans on many of its routes.

Consider that Wall’s $85 million estimate is not far off from the amount they just threw away on grants for the new Regina stadium ($80 million). And it pales in comparison to the ~$2 billion they’ve thrown away on the Regina bypass project:

STC isn’t draining the province. The Sask Party is.

The purpose of STC, and indeed the government, has never been to make money. The accumulated cost to businesses and taxpayers will be far greater than the STC subsidy ever was. This is taking away rural customers ability to participate in the regional market, taking away rural businesses access to affordable shipping, and taking away access to healthcare for seniors and people on reserves.

Going off the rails

Saskatchewan Grain Car Corporation is done, too. In their haste to put a sticker price on all the provincial planes, trains, and automobiles, the government actually forgot to mention the trains in their speech and media releases. It isn’t surprising they would want to keep this one quiet, as this is another sell-off sure to ruffle feathers with rural voters. This is a huge slap in the face to farmers as it means more rising shipping costs for the hardest-working among us.

Big debt increases

REALITY CHECK! The next time you hear Brad talk about how he is paying off the debt, remember that he is using “Sask Party Math”. By the government’s own account he has actually managed to double it in five years. At this rate, the legacy of the “Wall years” will be a debt we can never possibly pay off.

Taking from the poor

This budget doubled down on the Sask Party’s perverse, reverse-Robin-Hood tax scheme. You’ll see a jump in PST, which now applies to everything from new homes, (time to rethink that loan perhaps,) to children’s clothing, to drinks on a night out, to those rotisserie chickens at the grocery store. These changes hit the working class, middle-class families, and low-income people where it hurts. (More about Brad’s attacks on the poor, the ill, our First Nations and our environment in detail below.)

Brad’s economic shift got you heated yet? You’ll have to stay that way. You can’t afford to chill out. Your cigarettes are going up by 50 cents, and your pint is going up by almost 13% (6.8% + PST).

Giving to the very rich

In contrast, this budget sets up Saskatchewan to have the lowest corporate tax rates in Canada for business and manufacturing. Sound competitive enough? Enter the “Commercial Innovation Incentive” that will further lower the Corporate Income Tax rate from 12 percent to 6 percent for those who qualify. Here’s yet another demonstration of Brad Wall picking winners and losers, and throwing a massive giveaway to big business in a budget that was supposed to be all about sharing the load.

This is nothing new for the Sask Party, who have been lowering taxes for the wealthy and their big biz pals for a decade now. The idea was always that it would create jobs — so where are they? One has to question if Brad’s trickle-down economics are entirely sound — especially when it’s gotten us here, to this dark place, with 40,000 people unemployed. (For those keeping track, that’s twice as many of us out of work as when the Party took office ten years ago.)

This was always the plan

Brad Wall has long been an antagonist in the pages of Saskatchewan’s history books, assuming our common goals are economic diversification and individual liberty. He’s messed up our job options — now he’s taking aim at our freedom of mobility.

Sask Party trolls in the comments section, over and over again, will tell you to move if you don’t like it. Because that’s exactly what they want. And it’s easy to see why: eliminate all employment options with the exception of the few industries the Sask Party supports, and you breed a generation of supporters. The elimination of Saskatchewan’s (unionized) film industry certainly didn’t hurt them.

The emerging problem for them now is that the Sask Party is struggling to even prop up their own pals. As one friend puts it: “Only fossil fuels and football are safe.” That means things are about to get pretty ugly for Brad and the gang.

(We don’t need no) Education

Here are some other things the Wall government did (or, in some cases, failed to do) in the 2017 budget:

• Put more Crown land up for sale, ending the Saskatchewan Pastures Program without the consultation of ranchers or First Nations.
• Eliminated “Landscape Stewardship” from the Ministry of Environment, formerly the department which would “consult with Metis and First Nations communities to enhance environmental management outcomes.” Yup, all gone, the TRC and duty to consult be damned.
• Gutted funding for reforestation almost entirely.
• Reduced benefits for people on social assistance, cut funding for their clients’ funeral services, and did a bunch of dog-whistling about getting “able-bodied” people off of welfare.
• Gutted funding for Sask Housing almost entirely. One to watch.
• Took no action to restore the Lighthouse stabilization unit.
• Eliminated community service as an option for traffic fines. (So enjoy paying for those folks’ nights in the slammer.)
• Cut an unprecedented 5% from Saskatchewan’s already-strugging post-secondary institutions.
• Slashed student aid by a quarter.

• Changed the law so funds from the education portion of your property tax go to them, and not your school board.
• Changed the law so they can “issue directives” (translation: control curriculum) within school boards.
• Gutted funding for libraries. (Gone for Regina and Saskatoon, and cut by half for regional libraries.)
• Gutted funding for municipalities, some by as much as half, a move which Saskatoon mayor Charlie Clark says creates an “immediate fiscal crisis” for our City.
• Reduced Meewasin Valley’s funding by half, which is likely to be the end of the MVA.
• Cut regional parks funding by half.
• Took no action on ridesharing services like Uber, which they claimed to be working on for months. No new revenue stream there, unlike what we saw in the federal budget.
• Imposed higher taxes on credit unions.
• Raised fees for long-term care patients.
• Eliminated the bulk fuel tax exemption for farmers.
• Eliminated all health regions.
• Hiked utility rates.
• Broke their election promise of “no new taxes”.
• Abandoned their election promise for individualized funding for autism.
• Eliminated provincial coverage for hearing aids.
• Eliminated pastoral care in the health sector. (Sorry, Grandma, no Last Rites for you.)
• Cut operational funding for highways.

Are you fkin kidding me?

This budget is riddled with cruel and unusual punishments for Saskatchewan people who have been left to pay for the Sask Party’s reckless thievery. It attacks the values of Saskatchewan people, dismantles the legacy of Tommy Douglas, and declares open season on the sale of everything not nailed down.

By now, you’ve probably put together what all this means for you: libraries and businesses in your town will be closing, your tuition and housing costs will be going up, and the wealth gap will be getting larger and larger, as long as Brad and his bros are digging in all of our pockets to clean up the mess they made.

Here’s what you can do RIGHT NOW:

• Attend a protest rally in Regina, Saskatoon or Prince Albert
• Contact your MLA and tell them Saskatchewan is NOT FOR SALE
• Join the opposition party