For most of us, it’s an easy and simple solution to ask Saskatchewan public servants to do their part to tackle the province’s billion-dollar deficit.
But for Premier Brad Wall, it’s also a problem of his own making.
Consider the wages at SaskPower.
According to the 2015 to 2016 Crown Payee Disclosure – the detailed spending report for our publicly own Crown corporations including wages – 1,797 of 3,777 SaskPower employees were earning more than $100,000 a year. The total payroll was $344.8 million in 2015 to 2016, so the average wage was $91,289 a year.
Just a decade or so earlier in 2004, there were only 164 SaskPower employees earning six figures a year, or an average of $73,509 per year.
So in about a decade, SaskPower payroll has nearly doubled and the average SaskPower wage has increased 24 per cent.
Of course, most of it occurred under Wall’s watch.
And it can be argued that SaskPower employees haven’t done nearly as well as other public servants like Saskatchewan’s registered nurses.
Notwithstanding the Saskatchewan Party’s introduction of its Essential Services legislation (later struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada) in 2008, the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN) was greeted by a 36 per cent or more wage increase over the next four years from the newly elected Wall government. Nurses’ contracts since have been more in line with the two or three per cent annual wage increases of SaskPower employees.
But you are getting the picture.
The last budget report of the NDP government in 2006 and 2007 had operating expenses of $7.7 billion, which was about $3.7 billion more than when the NDP took power 16 years earlier.
However, according to the mid-year update for the 2016 and 2017 budget, government spending in a decade has doubled a $7 million increase in government spending to $14.7 million.
The political issue isn’t so much that employee wages make up 60 per cent of government spending, as Wall correctly observed in a series of year-end interviews with reporters.
The issue is that it was Wall’s government that was fully responsible for wages and government spending increasing even more rapidly in the past nine years than they were increasing under the previous administration.
“I hope there’s goodwill and good faith on the part of provider unions and managers and people that work in the public service to realize that even what’s being paid right now might not be sustainable,” Wall told The Canadian Press.
“At some point, I think we have to determine in the long-term interest of the province, do we engage in layoffs or rollbacks…
“That doesn’t always happen in government. Maybe we need to have that conversation and see if we can avoid what might be dramatic layoffs.”
This is likely true. But can Brad Wall make the argument – in good faith – when it was his government negotiating these huge wage increases in the past decade?
In the case of the 2008 36 per cent increase given to the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses, it was deemed an unnecessary move even at the time.
Moreover, Wall has been even more generous in the wage increases he has paid to individuals on his own staff in the past decade, many of whom have seen fantastic increases in pay for nothing more than a change in job title.
And then there is the little matter of Wall increasing the legislative assembly by three more MLAs.
Credit Wall for acknowledging that he knows this move will be unpopular.
“I’m not prepared to sort of kick this can down the road like provinces used to do in the 80s or even like some are doing today,” he said.
But if layoffs or wage cuts are now necessary, they have been made necessary by Wall’s own decisions.
