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Politics - Wages not behind big deficit

Far be it for me to suggest the Saskatchewan Party government shouldn’t do something about high civil service wages.

Far be it for me to suggest the Saskatchewan Party government shouldn’t do something about high civil service wages.

Generous wage to certain public sector workers is something I have occasionally harped on since Premier Brad Wall came to power a decade ago.

One of the first orders of business for new health minister Don McMorris was a 36-per-cent raise over four years for the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN) in the spring of 2008.

Tales of the behind-the-scene negotiations are legendary. One such story claims the nurses’ bargaining team had walked away from the table happy with the deal they had, when government negotiators came back and sweetened the deal even more.

What is a matter of record is this was highest wage settlement in provincial government history.

And there have been a few other generous settlements in the Wall era.

Consider the Sask. Party’s rather generous treatment of SaskPower workers at a time when it was pumping $1.6 billion into carbon capture at Boundary Dam and rest of were paying for all-too-often nine-per-cent increases in our electrical bills.

But can you really blame nurses or power workers for getting whatever they can at the bargaining table?

After all, nurses and power workers do work damn hard for their money — often, under circumstances that a lot of us wouldn’t tolerate.

Moreover, many of these people are likely your neighbours or friends — especially, in rural Saskatchewan.

But here are a couple of other we things we should keep in mind in relation to this across the board wage freeze.

First, nurses and power workers aside, the vast majority of public sector workers like teachers, snowplough operators, etc. have not received massive hikes.

In fact, wage settlements are one of the few areas of government costs where Wall and company has generally kept the lid on spending.

Really, the problem is countless other expenditure decisions made in the past decade.

After all, it’s always easy to justify spending.

The billions upon billions spent on roads, schools and hospitals — all part of what the Sask. Party called an “infrastructure deficit” left behind by the previous government — are obviously good things that benefit everyone.

But is the government’s job to simply give people absolutely everything they ask for?

Obviously not. Even in times of boom — like in 2008 when the government was building infrastructure and handing out a generous settlement to the nurses — there was only so much money to go around.

Well, there is no boom right now. But we are still paying for the nurse salary increases, the cost of the roads, etc.

In fact, Saskatchewan hasn’t been booming for some time. But that didn’t stop the government to borrow $1.7 billion in the last two budgets — borrowing that has contributed mightily to today’s one-billion-dollar deficit.

And let’s be clear that money went to building — not to public sector workers who are now being told to either accept a wage freeze or accept layoffs.

In the case of many such public employees — including Saskatchewan nurses — the government is asking them to forego wage increases they have already negotiated.

That’s why public employees and others find it galling that the Wall government is trying to convince the public that the problem is public service employee wages. Notwithstanding the wage settlements nurses and power workers, wages aren’t why we have a big deficit.

Similar, while these are tough times for oilpatch workers, that has nothing to do with nurses or electrical workers or any public sector employees.

If anything, it’s a distraction from other issues and solutions to the deficit jackpot the Sask. Party now finds itself in.

For this, the Sask. Party only has itself to blame.

Murray Mandryk has been covering provincial politics for over 22 years.