NDP finance critic Trent Wotherspoon has called the provincial budget a "Credit card budget," saying that it pushes costs onto future generations.
One of the primary places where Wotherspoon sees the budget falling short is in education, and he says that the current budget is not going to meet the needs in the classrooms of the province. He says that class sizes are increasing but that there has also been 350 educational assistant jobs cut in the province, and that this budget hasn't done anything to rectify the problems faced by the province's educational system.
"Education in the classroom is at great strain. We have many classrooms that are bursting at the seams, in some cases we have students actually taught in hallways and staff rooms... This creates learning environments that are less than conducive to learning," he says.
"We have larger class sizes with fewer supports, and certainly this budget is a real failure when it comes to education."
Wotherspoon says that the education budget should have met the challenges of inflation and population, but he says it doesn't keep pace with inflation.
He also says that long term care and health care are facing "tough choices." With his party putting a high priority on long term care in their own platform, he says that it is disappointing to see very little action on a front which he believes should be a priority.
"If you look at the demographics of Saskatchewan, we need to be making investments in making more spaces and choices in long term care and this is something we're falling further behind on."
"We hear of far too many circumstances of seniors being separated, many long distances from home communities and families, and that's simply wrong."
Another area where Wotherspoon is not pleased is the SaskBuilds program, which is focused on Public-private partnerships, or P3s. He says this is the wrong way to go about infrastructure improvements, and he believes that it will be a more expensive way to work on infrastructure improvements.
"Really what it is, is a tricky privatization financing scheme to build infrastructure now, put the debt onto the books of the private sector at a higher interest rate and for it to cost us far more over the long run and for us to be transferring taxpayer money well into the future. It also brings with it concerns about control of that infrastructure."
While the Saskatchewan government is touting the new budget as balanced, Wotherspoon also claims that it is not, and that the past three budgets have also not been balanced. He says that there needs to be a change in the way accounting is done in the province in order to allow for greater transparency.
Overall, Wotherspoon finds the budget lacking, especially in areas which the provincial NDP have mentioned as their primary focus for the immediate future, such as in education and long-term care, and as a result says that his party does not support the budget.
