Dear Editor
The Sask. Party's recent revelation on its plans for the future included an admission that, if they were re-elected to government, they would begin with a budget focusing so intently on trying to achieve a balanced budget that it could honestly only be called an austerity budget. Most economists point out that the time to make balanced budgets a prime goal of government is when money is pouring into government coffers, and that the time to resort to deficit budgets is when the economy is beginning to lag and needs some government investment to encourage growth.
But, of course, if your political ideology includes no role for government above such basics as the police or the military, cutting down on such frivolous spending as social programs, healthcare, education and provincial infrastructure to help in achieving the goal of a balanced budget just makes good sense in times of diminished economic growth. Brad Wall evidently believes in that kind of “good sense,” so his resorting to an austerity budget to try to solve the Wall government's already severe budget problems should come as no surprise.
What is a little strange, though, is that, while the province has been in a decade of marvelously rich sources of revenue (a decade that began with the previous NDP government), there has been inadequate funding in social spending, crown corporations have been almost sucked dry, and more has been added to the provincial debt, while rich foreign business consultants have prospered with such projects as the “lean” programme and the very expensive, but not really useful, Boundary Dam carbon-capture project. And, what has happened to the “rainy day” fund that was supposed to help out when the going got tough?
Maybe, with a new mandate for the Sask. Party to form a government, we could see a return to the “bad old days” of the Devine government of the 1980s, when our provincial debt rose by about 12 billion dollars in only nine years, while ruining the provincial credit rating and nearly bankrupting the province.
Russell Lahti
Battleford
