Mr. Wall suggests unpaid days off for the public servants to balance the budget? Sacrilege, you scream in frustration if you are beholding to these public service jobs.
Let’s take a brief recognition though that it is every other taxpayer who pays the nice pensions and other benefits of the unionized government workers. Many of those other free enterprise taxpayers are in tough times as well with no pensions.
Mr. Wall and company never allowed for the inevitability of a downturn in the markets.
His “give the resources away mentality at the lowest world royalty rates” has never allowed adequate returns to build up a rainy day fund for the hard times we are all now facing.
The negative impacts of his rhetoric in (keeping Saskatchewan strong) and (growth) by bending over backwards to invite huge predatory corporations into the province to pillage the infrastructure and resources so they can take the profits out of the province despite the expected negative impacts has come home to roost.
Cutbacks all across the board: few are insulated except the predatory industries that are really not affected by cutbacks to the public or to the environmental degradation that accompanies their industries.
This is a time we should step back to reflect on our lifestyles based on the capitalist philosophy of everything can be sacrificed to make a profit. Nothing equalizes class status like meeting your neighbours on handout day, at the local food bank or in the cancer clinic because of industrial poisons. Perhaps you should use the time off work to reflect if basing our economy on giving away our resources and poisoning our environment to get re-elected is headed in the right direction.
Nurturing the value of our resources in value-added industries to keep the profits in the province makes more sense to me than shipping the resources out of the country en masse, so these mutli-nationals can make greater profits in adding value to those resources based on the cheap, disposable, labour in Bangladesh.
Our resources would last longer and our environment could be maintained in the healthy state needed for us to live in if we added that value here at home. I view these ideas as being respectful of employment in the province and the environment our future generations must live in.
Greg Chatterson
Fort San
