The warning signs are coming in and they’re not pretty.
We are in for a tough provincial budget — one in which there is legitimate reason for us to lower expectations of what we might have hoped to receive from Premier Brad Wall’s government.
And we may be in for tougher economic times sooner than we thought as well, although the hope still is that the economy will ride out the storm before things get really tough.
The latest sign of a tough economy came in the form of something rarely seen in these parts in the past five years — a decline in a the number of working people compared with the same period last year.
There were 1,200 fewer working people (558,200) in Saskatchewan in January compared with January 2014. It marked only the second time in the last year and only the third time since 2010 that year-over-year jobs have fallen in this province, according to the monthly Statistics Canada labour force survey
Associate Economy Minister Jeremy Harrison was quick to lay the blame on tanking oil prices, but Doug Elliott of Sask Trends Monitor believes something else is going on.
Elliott, the province’s foremost statistician, noted that jobs in Alberta actually rose despite the fact that its economy is even more dependent on oil than Saskatchewan’s.
Moreover, while oil decline is more likely to impact technical services like law, engineering and accounting and restaurants and accommodations, the biggest Saskatchewan job losses were in transportation, retail sales, trade (3,400 fewer jobs) and agriculture (5,000 fewer jobs).
Whether this is necessarily good news may be a matter of interpretation, but Elliott cautions against panic over a single month’s decline.
You may also recall that Elliott is the guy that’s of the view that oil prices are likely to recover before Saskatchewan truly feels the brunt of the impact.
But that won’t be soon enough to ward off the hammering we are about to take in the March provincial budget, which is far more susceptible to the whims of oil prices because of revenue we derive from oil.
And lest there remains any doubt over this, consider the not-so-subtle message Wall has sent out by announcing a wage freeze for ministers (and now all MLAs), political staff and other appointees and Crown heads and senior government managers.
The base pay for a Saskatchewan MLA will be frozen at last year’s rate of $94,668 while cabinet ministers will get by with $142,866 this year and Wall will have to settle for his $163,560 salary.
It’s hardly a hardship and savings involved with all staff and bureaucrat come to $15 million — a paltry sum compared with the $600- to $800-million revenue shortfall Wall said his government must fine through declining oil prices.
Moreover, the government has so far offered no cost-saving figure from its hiring freeze of all non-essential, non-frontline government workers. The government might be blowing a bit of smoke here.
That said, it’s symbolic and it’s also political leadership.
One surely can’t expect rural Saskatchewan people to accept freezes to highways, schools and hospitals if the politicians, themselves, aren’t willing to do the same.
One suspects it was a warning shot mostly aimed at the public sector — especially teachers, nurses, cancer agency employees and the SaskPower workers whose contracts all expire in 2015. These happen to be the unions have often been the most difficult for governments in the last two decades.
Combined with Wall’s musing of using the notwithstanding clause to take away striking rights in the wake of his government’s loss before the Supreme Court, the message to public employees seems particularly loud.
But it’s likely a message to the rest of us as well — a message that the budget won’t be pretty.
Murray Mandryk has been covering provincial politics for over 22 years.
