By now you’ve likely had it with the bad news and may be in the mood for some good news.
After all, it’s been a typical Saskatchewan winter where the warm spells don’t last long enough and the cold snaps seem to go on and on.
There is still lots to grumble about on coffee row over a crop that took forever to get off and just as long to get to market. Heck, the railways have hardly gotten the 2013 crop — the bumper crop that should have sold for solid prices — to market.
And now there is all this talk about lay-offs in the oil patch because of crude falling below $50 US a barrel. Certainly, a provincial government scrambling for cash is looking at every way to make up for lost revenue. Besides less for roads, schools and hospitals, there are even rumours that the government might be considering ending the sales tax exemptions on fertilizers, seed and farm equipment.
Well, how about the good news that this economic downturn might not be so bad or so long.
Or so says Saskatchewan’s leading statistician who has gotten pretty good at seeing trends before the rest of us do.
“2015 is not going to be the crunch year,” said Dough Elliott, author of Sask Trends Monitor and a guy who has been watching the numbers closely for 35 years now. “It (the economic crunch) will be 2016.
“I think it takes about a year for it (oil prices) to trickle into the economy. It’s almost immediate for government revenue, but it takes a longer time for the provincial economy to be effected.”
If you work for government, this is not great news. Nor is it exactly great news for the rest of us that occasionally rely on the roads, schools and hospitals government builds and maintain. Avoiding the budget hit will be difficult and Elliott notes that the value public building permits already fell 44-per-cent decline to $210 million 2014 from $378 million in 2013.
But while in the past one might have expected this to send Saskatchewan into an economic tailspin accompanied by job and population loss and “have not” status, the new Saskatchewan seems far more capable of weather there downturns.
Just consider the last 10 years since this economic boom/upswing started.
Elliott said Saskatchewan really started to take off in about 2005-06 when it was clear that oil and potash numbers were turning around the economy from its dependence on even more unpredictable agriculture.
In fact, since 2005, Saskatchewan has produced 92,000 more jobs — about 9,200 or 1.8-per-cent more a year.
And that job grown has been pretty consistent. Just look at the yearly percentage increase in the number of working people in Saskatchewan: 2006, 1.8 per cent; 2007, 2.4 per cent; 2008, 1.7 per cent; 2009, 1.3 per cent; 2010, .9 per cent; 2011, .3 per cent; 2012, 2.1 per cent, 2013, 2.4 per cent, and; 2014, 1.9 per cent.
But Elliott says we should pay special attention to the 2010-11 when job growth slipped to .9- and .3-per-cent after the market meltdown in October 2008 and slide in 2009. After that, it nicely recovered in 2012, ‘13 and ‘14.
If this is any indication, it may mean the overall impact of this oil slide may not really hit until 2016. And by that point, it’s quite possible that oil prices will have recovered.
Admittedly, some in the oil patch already facing layoffs will find little comfort in this. No doubt, some rural communities area already feeling the crunch.
But Elliott believes Saskatchewan will ride out this storm much more easily.
If so, it would be a welcomed bit of good news.
Murray Mandryk has been covering provincial politics for over 22 years.
