The Saskatchewan Party brought down its most recent provincial budget last week, and there was a near audible sigh of relief.
Our collective expectation of this government managing to deliver a budget which wasn’t another document of offloading provincial debt for others to pay, and increased taxes to offset government spending was not particularly high.
And the Saskatchewan Party had done a good job of letting the public think just that, especially having already hiked costs to the public outside the actual budget.
Starting May 1, the base amount on all speeding fines will increase by $30 and the fine per kilometre over the speed limit will double.
The province expects to collect an extra $6.4 million per year in revenue from the fine increases.
Then there were recycling fees.
The government is expected to see an additional $10.2 million, which will come from a two-cent increase on all refundable beverage containers in the province. Effective April 1, the environmental handling charges will cost consumers five cents for tetra cartons, seven cents for aluminum cans, eight cents for plastic jugs/bottles and nine cents for glass containers.
So taxpayers are facing additional costs in the year ahead, even if the budget is suggesting it is a neutral document in terms of taxes.
Of course the neutral budget is one which still leaves the province in a deficit position.
Saskatchewan’s new premier Scott Moe ran on a platform of balancing the province’s budget by 2019, and the estimates provided in the 2018 budget show that the government is on track to achieve that, with a $6 million surplus being projected for the 2019-20 fiscal year. But, that includes a projected deficit of $595 million in this budget and $365 million in the next budget, if the numbers are bang on.
Whether the current economy can sustain the targets is a bit of a guess considering the continued pressure on people’s pocketbooks through municipal tax increases, utility cost hikes which cut into the amount of disposable money many of us have to spend to keep a sluggish economy from completely stalling.
So business, personal, and sales taxes were held in line but that hasn’t exactly got people jumping for joy for a job well done in Regina.
This is the government which held the reins through the best economic cycle Saskatchewan has seen, and that was just a few years ago, yet here we are in a string of deficits, and residents have faced new costs from multiple sources.
It is not what we expected from our leadership, nor our economy, and this budget doesn’t exactly renew the confidence we have lost through recent provincial budgets.
