There are several reasons why an election debate over Saskatchewan’s debt is hard to have.
For starters, it’s more fun for all voters to talk about what politicians will spend on them.
We all secretly want to believe the notion peddled by many politicians that governments can spend as much as they want, not raise taxes and still somehow magically balance the books.
But its’s a particularly discussion for rural folk who don’t particularly feel obliged to again be saddled with the brunt of fixing the debt issue.
The last major restructuring was fought on the back of rural people who saw 52 of their hospitals converted to “wellness centres.
Moreover, rural people also wound up carrying more than their share of the tax burden, because of the things like the education tax on agriculture land.
Yet they got is less schools, less nursing homes and certainly less hospitals. And highways were simply a mess.
And the horrifically sad reality two decades ago is that rural Saskatchewan was vulnerable to all these cuts because it was simultaneously hit by downturn in the economy.
The less viability small farms and the weaker the oilpatch and potash sector, the more likely people were to leave rural Saskatchewan. The more people that left, the harder it became to justify keeping all the schools and hospitals open.
But while many in rural Saskatchewan have hoped the above was a distance nightmare, consider the reality of today.
The boom of the past decade largely benefitted Regina and Saskatoon, as we watched many towns and smaller cities in rural Saskatchewan continue to decline.
Now, we are again in a cycle of declining oil and potash sector — largely because of world economic events beyond anyone’s control.
However, this same world economic reality — much like it did in the 1980s during the Grant Devine era — is again taking its toll on the province’s finances.
Consider Finance Minister Kevin Doherty’s recent third-quarter update of the 2015-16 budget.
Saskatchewan’s Finance Minister announced that the overall provincial debt for this budget year is $427-million. That’s a half-billion dollars worse than the $107-million surplus former finance minister Ken Krawetz initially announced. It’s even a far cry from what Doherty’s own mid-year budget update three months ago when he announced $292-million deficit.
And this doesn’t even include the $700 million in open-market borrowing for capital spending that the Sask. Party government has kept off the books.
Added that $700 million to the admitted $472-million deficit and we are now looking at $1.2-billion deficit this budget year.
Of course, a government starting an election campaign this week surely doesn’t want to talk about a billion-dollar deficit.
Or at the very least, Doherty and company did their utmost to downplay the true deficit figure.
But what’s far harder to discount is that — as of Dec. 31 — Saskatchewan public debt had risen to $13.548 billion. That’s nearly $2-billion more than a year ago when the year-end total public debt for 2014-15 was $11.658 billion.
It’s also about where this province’s finances were when the Devine government left office nearly a quarter-century ago.
So this leaves us with a question many of us would rather not have to answer: How will we deal with this rising debt?
Maybe the job situation and growth aren’t the problems they were in the 1990s. But make no mistake that the overall debt situation is now about what the Roy Romanow government inherited.
The mistake that Saskatchewan people made both in the 1991 and 1986 elections was not talking about that rising debt.
So before people in rural Saskatchewan and elsewhere wind up having to pay the price again, maybe we should have a debt conversation this election campaign.
Murray Mandryk has been covering provincial politics for over 22 years.
