Once in a while, democracy works the way it ought to, and the voice of the people is heard and acted upon by those elected to represent them in the halls of power, in this case, the Saskatchewan Legislature.
Word came down on Monday that the “power of the people” worked, and the grassroots scored a victory, as the Wall administration reversed their position on the cuts to the province’s regional library system, and restored the massive cuts they had taken out of their hide.
The shock and dismay of library boards, employees and the general public was unequivocal when it came out that the regional library system was not only cut by 58 per cent, but it was made retroactive to January 1, after the libraries were nearing the end of their first quarter of operations and had already spent a good part of their budgets.
There were layoffs at nearly every regional library system in the province, including Southeast Regional Library, plus the provincial inter-library book sharing service known by the acronym SILS, or the Saskatchewan Information and Library Services consortium, was shut down because there simply were no funds to run it anymore.
This latter move was a major blow to the library system province-wide, because through SILS, a library patron could borrow any book or item from any library collection in the province.
Now, with the restoration of funding back to last year’s level, one of the first moves the regional directors will be making together is to get SILS back up and running again to serve the lovers of books and libraries across the province, and in Southeast at least, the rate increase of $5.77 per capita will be cancelled. For Weyburn, this means a saving of $63,000, and in a tough economic year like this one, that means a lot.
The restoration of funding was a result of the province-wide campaign of support for libraries that came from literally every part of Saskatchewan, including the “Drop Everything and Read” protest held a couple of weeks ago, which had strong crowds here in Weyburn and in nearly every centre that has a library and/or an MLA office.
The campaign of support also included letter-writing, and coloured pages of “Why Libraries are Important”, not to mention people sitting down and talking to MLAs about why this was wrong. Perhaps it was the sum total of everyone’s voices, that even included a baby boy with the words written on his T-shirt, “Mr. Morgan, I can’t go to story hour on-line.” In the end, the government acknowledged mistakes were made, and the funding was restored. — Greg Nikkel
