In mid-April community based organizations (CBOs) were hearing the rumblings the Saskatchewan government was about to cut their funding by 10 per cent.
At the time it was Health Minister Jim Reiter who hoisted the initial trial balloon that such a cut was being considered.
Reiter has now announced the province won’t be reducing CBO budgets.
It is at least interesting to note Reiter is one of the MLAs who is expected to announce he will run for the Saskatchewan Party leadership, a race where the winner also assumes the mantle of Premier. There is no doubt eliminating the cut will play well in terms of a leadership race as a way of showing social concern on the part of Reiter.
Of course the announcement is one where the Saskatchewan Party can’t win in terms of overall image.
On the one hand it looks positive from the point of view of social programming, but then it automatically brings into question how the government could see the cuts as a good idea less than half a year ago, but now are retreating on that point.
This is of course not an isolated retreat.
In April the Saskatchewan government said it made a mistake and would restore $4.8 million in funding for the province’s libraries. Money for regional branches was cut 58 per cent in the provincial budget released a month earlier, and was scrapped altogether for libraries in Saskatoon and Regina.
The library cuts of course caused a significant uproar in communities across the province, so the government decision to reinstate the library funding could be seen as responding to public demand.
Then again it brings into question how it was a good idea mere weeks earlier, but then suddenly it was funding worthy of being invested again.
In both instances the dollars involved were seen as something reasonable to cut by the government as it struggled to deal with a huge deficit. The cuts in the last budget were widespread as can be attested to by the closure of the provincial bus line, and the significant cuts to urban municipalities which led to a major hike in municipal taxes here in the city.
The local taxes rose even after the province capped announced reductions to grants-in-lieu to municipalities. The government maintained the grants-in-lieu for nine municipalities so that they would not experience a reduction of more than 30 per cent in revenue sharing. Yorkton was one of the nine.
One retreat in terms of funding decisions could well be righting an oversight in the budget creation process. A growing list of changes of funding direction suggest a budget process by the Saskatchewan Party so focused on cuts to reduce their missed budgetary projections a year earlier, that cuts were made helter skelter without fully understanding their implications.
