With the provincial budget comes cuts to services. One group that is facing the chopping block is the provincial libraries.
According to the Saskatchewan government, “the seven regional library systems will receive $2.5 million in operating funding, a decrease of $3.5 million.”
The reason being for these cuts, according to Education Minister Don Morgan is that “the province no longer wants to be in the library business,” and the “brick and mortar,” libraries are no longer valid.
He was recently quoted saying that Saskatchewan has “too many libraries.”
The Saskatchewan people are not taking this lightly and so they should not.
And it is not just book readers who are affected by library cuts.
A very good point was made during the March 29 Blue Sky on CBC Saskatchewan: if Minister Morgan is convinced that digital is the future, he should try to look for digital copies of those hard to find books. What is
going to happen to those Saskatchewan history books? How many are going to be lost to library closures?
Digital book sales took a drop in 2015 at a time when digital book sales counted for 20 per cent of the market. That is a strong indication that e-books are not the be all end all of the literary world.
Libraries have heard the war cries of the digital world and they responded by adding digital services like online e-book borrowing services and increasing their in library computer services.
They even offer items for the non-readers like CDs and DVDs.
Eleanor Crumblehulme is a library assistant who works in North Battleford. She said in a tweet response to author Neil Gaiman in 2010 that, “cuts to libraries during a recession are like cuts to hospitals during a plague. Just plain silly!”
Listening to the people who will be affected by this, no truer sentiment has ever been spoken.
We may not be in a recession but we are facing hard financial times and any way we help people reduce these effects of financial difficulty, benefits society as a whole.
It is not just about the content they offer but also the services. Cuts to these mean something to everyone in the community.
If you start a child reading early, they will always be a reader and a thinker. How can they be readers without easy access to the millions of books available?
Where can immigrants first arriving to Canada pick up material to help them grasp the language?
Where can people looking for jobs have easy access to internet to help them join the workforce?
Where can seniors, the majority of which do not have the money for internet access, go and stay connected to their family and friends?
The commonality of all these groups is the fact that they are all the vulnerable members of society.
Just like the destruction of the STC, this seems to be a common thread of who is most affected by this provincial budget.
