Last week, at what was the best-attended Chamber of Commerce luncheon in recent memory, Kevin Doherty, Saskatchewan finance minister, defended his government’s 2017 budget.
The overriding message Doherty tried to impart to business leaders at St. Gerard’s Parish Hall April 7, was that the government’s goals in putting together the controversial budget were continued economic growth, reducing dependence on resource-based revenues and returning to balance within three years.
In order to do that, he summarized, they decided the best approach was to spread the pain and shift toward consumption-based as opposed to income-based taxation.
Doherty detailed some of the measures including the one per cent increase to the provincial sales tax and applying it to formerly exempt items such as restaurant food and children’s clothing.
Meanwhile, he said, they would phase in reductions to income and corporate taxes.
He talked about reducing the cost of government by cutting public sector wages by 3.5 per cent starting with MLAs and negotiating the how the reduction would be implemented with the public sector unions.
Doherty called the decision to shut down STC “gut-wrenching,” but defended it saying an ever-increasing subsidy, which now amounted to $94 per passenger, simply made continuing the bus service untenable.
Responding to a very pointed question from Dwayne Reeve, president of Parkland College as to how the Sask Party could not have had more foresight when times were good, Doherty invoked hindsight being 20-20.
“I will accept criticism we should have done something, but now I’m doing something,” he said.
Doherty bristled at a question from Tom Seely, a retired social worker, suggesting the budget unfairly downloaded financial problems onto municipalities in the middle of their own budget deliberations. Doherty said there were only so many places where a province could find savings and in order fulfill provincial responsibilities for health, education, infrastructure, social services and justice while digging out of a $1.3 billion hole, they were simply trying to spread the pain as widely as possible, including asking their municipal partners to share the burden.
Doherty also stood by the government’s record, suggesting a fair assessment requires looking at
the entirety of the Sask Party’s time in power, not just this most recent setback.
“If you look at any number of metrics, whether it’s our spending in health care, our spending in education, our spending in social services, certainly highways and infrastructure, all of those areas have if not doubled, more than doubled since we came to office,” he said. “At the same time, we reduced taxes for virtually every taxpayer in the province.
“If you go back and do a comparative analysis of where we have spent taxpayers’ money over the last 10 years, people say ‘well, you might have overspent and not saved any.’ First of all, I reiterate, we put money back in pockets of taxpayers, we paid down three billion dollars in operating debt, it’s back up now, I agree, because of the resource revenue decline, but we have more than doubled funding in the priority areas of health, education and social services.”
