"Steady as she goes isn't such a bad thing." — Premier Scott Moe on his 2024-25 Saskatchewan budget.
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For those who don’t remember a time when a Saskatchewan Party government didn’t rule the land, reaction to most NDP government budgets was similarly predictable.
Unimaginative. Uninspired. Risk averse.
“Dare to be dull” could have been the theme of most NDP budgets … the exception being those budgets in 1992 and 1993 with big tax increases and service cuts driven by the dire need to fix the financial mess left behind by the previous conservative government.
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Seemingly shell-shocked from those days in the early 1990s, during which 52 rural hospitals were “converted” to clinics and the provincial sales tax was hiked to nine per cent, subsequent NDP budgets steered clear of controversy.
No news became good news. It was the NDP that first made “no tax increases” a budget highlight — something the Sask. Party Opposition once mocked.
Now, it does the same thing in its own budgets.
It’s also one of the reasons why the NDP was once known as Saskatchewan’s natural governing party.
Fast forward a few decades to the new natural governing party — the Sask. Party — which still seems similarly traumatized from its own bad budget experience in 2017.
That 2017 budget raised the provincial sales tax to six per cent (the previous NDP government eventually cut it to as low as five per cent).
That budget even cut the flat rate of burial costs that government would pay for deceased Saskatchewan Assistance Program clients to $2,100 from $3,850. Government is no longer covering the funeral costs of flowers, music, an obituary, meal or a headstone.
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Suffice to say, people did not respond well. Since then, this Sask. Party government has seemed equally determined to make budget day a low-key event. (Read: Unimaginative. Uninspired. Risk averse.)
As a result, we have been getting budgets like the one we got Wednesday — dull, small-deficit budgets that don’t hike taxes or cut much of anything, but also don’t offer to cut taxes or do much to get spending under control.
“Steady as she goes isn’t such a bad thing,” Premier Scott Moe told reporters Thursday morning, less that 24 hours after his pre-election budget that got people neither angry nor excited.
In fairness, Moe noted “steady as she goes” also means record population, investments and jobs. The Sask. Party would sooner “choose the challenges of growth over the challenges of decline,” he added. “Steady as she goes is pretty positive.”
Perhaps. But others in the legislative chamber — perhaps even others on his governing side of the mace — wanted to see something splashier in the budget.
“Why is this tired and out-of-touch government delivering nothing new to help people make ends meet?” asked NDP Opposition leader Carla Beck in Thursday morning’s question period.
Given this is an election year when many are clamouring for help with the high cost of living, one might have thought that the Sask. Party government would have been eager to make a budget statement of some sort.
Even Finance Minister Donna Harpauer seemed to want to go with a bit of a bang before retirement.
“I would have loved to have ended with a last budget that was balanced and able to do a tax reduction,” Harpauer told reporters Wednesday. “However, it is the budget that I am comfortable with.”
Alas, her last budget seemed more like those NDP budgets she used to criticize when she got into politics 25 years ago.
Moe on Thursday offered a rather low-key response to Beck, noting a plethora of stakeholders who have expressed relative satisfaction with what they got out of the budget.
He has a point. Reaction to the 2024-25 budget did seem more positive than the reaction to the 2023-24 budget that, at the time, was offering a massive billion-dollar surplus.
Herein lies the lessons learned.
A year ago, folks — many of whom are still contending with inflation today — clearly thought that soon-to-disappear surplus should have been spent on them.
This year’s budget, with its small deficit that spreads the spending around, creates no such expectations or disappointments.
Boring works.
Murray Mandryk is the political columnist for the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
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