Here's Exactly How Finance Minister Donna Harpauer Has Misled Us On Sask Crop Insurance

As far as I can tell, it's game over for this 60-year-old, once highly-profitable rural Saskatchewan institution. What an absolute shame.

In November 2021 Donna Harpauer held a mid-year fiscal update in the Legislature.

In that update, as well as in the Sask Party government’s related news release, Harpauer blamed farmers for her projected multi-billion dollar deficit for the 2021-22 fiscal year.

“If you backed out the expense of crop insurance as well as the livestock producer support we would almost be balanced,” Harpauer told reporters. “That is how significant that support was for our agricultural producers.” - Donna Harpauer, November 29, 2021, Global Saskatoon

Lol.

The Sask Party has been significantly supporting Saskatchewan agricultural producers since never.

The truth is that Saskatchewan farmers and provincial taxpayers had already paid, well in advance, for 2021’s crop insurance payouts, however Finance Minister Donna Harpauer and the Sask Party government have spent every single penny of SCIC’s surplus cash.

As you likely learned in high school economics, insurance companies make money - a lot of money - by investing their customers’ premiums, which ideally, typically are worth far more than their claims.

In 2012, one year after the Sask Party won their second term by a landslide, the Sask Party government drained SCIC’s cash investments and started spending crop insurance surpluses on government operations.

Therefore, in 2021, Donna Harpauer and the Sask Party government had to borrow billions of dollars to pay back what they took from SCIC.