
Sask. Budget 2023: One weird trick to underfund public services
Faced with a crisis in health care and underfunded schools, the government of Saskatchewan is using its huge surplus to pay down the deficit.
Simon Enoch (he/him) is Director of the Saskatchewan Office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Regina. Find him on twitter at @simon_enoch
Faced with a crisis in health care and underfunded schools, the government of Saskatchewan is using its huge surplus to pay down the deficit.
It’s hard to interpret recent political announcements as anything other than deceptive
The Saskatchewan government's Drawing the Line: Defending Saskatchewan’s Economic Autonomy is more a political document that doesn't bode well for Scott Moe's government or those that live under it.
This year the CCPA Saskatchewan office released our living wage calculations, hot on the heels of the provincial government’s decision to raise what is currently Canada’s lowest minimum wage at $11.81 per hour to $15 per hour over the next two years.
Privatization of liquor. Asset sales. Public service cuts. Saskatchewan went down this road out of deficit fears. It didn’t work. Other provinces should heed this lesson.
Is the public really getting more bang for its buck?
The Saskatchewan government appears to have no appetite to enact and defend the types of cuts it made in 2017. Maybe those tropes are dead? Or maybe the pandemic is making the obvious impossible to completely ignore.
Who could have predicted that a pandemic would be so unpredictable?
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