Once upon a time the provincial budget used to represent a serious commitment made by the Government of Saskatchewan to the people it purports to serve.
Today it is nothing more than a song and dance.
The worst kind of pageantry; a performance put on by a troupe that clearly thinks its audience is stupid.
Political pomp and circumstance.
The budget is mainly divided into two main parts:
“Estimates”, or what the Sask Party is
pretendingprojecting it’s going to spend this year in each Ministry.The Sask Party’s guess at what revenue the province is going to receive over the coming fiscal year from taxation (the privilege you and I have of paying these clowns our own money to screw us with), natural resources, Crown corporations etc.
An extra dollar on the WTI projection here, a tweak to a commodity forecast or taxation revenue there, maybe a bit of lower-than-anticipated spending on line items that are difficult to dispute and voila!
The Sask Party has a “surplus” budget.
I don’t pay attention, in fact I avoid the Sask Party’s highlights and talking points, which tend to be what the mainstream media, which received embargoed copies of the budget documents and their associated talking points and news releases yesterday, releases first.
What the budget is actually good for is also two parts:
Ascertaining which social programs or otherwise useful public services the Sask Party is cutting - ie. STC, libraries.
A laugh.
There’s a reason most governments hold a celebratory “Budget Day”, but not a “Public Accounts Day”.
Every year, on the last Wednesday of March, the Government of Saskatchewan delivers a provincial budget.
Eighteen months later, in the final quarter of the following year, Public Accounts Vol 2 is released, which is the actual accounting of what was spent and (mostly) with whom.
The above table from 2019-20 Vol 2 breaks down the original Appropriation for (or cash transferred to) each Ministry or agency, in the first column. That is the amount we were provided on Budget Day eighteen months earlier.
The work I do is time-consuming and often expensive. If you are interested in supporting my work and/or seeing it broaden its reach to further inform Saskatchewan residents, who just aren’t getting the information they need anymore to make decisions about life in Saskatchewan, I welcome eTransferred donations at @tammyrobert0123@gmail.com. Every dollar helps, thank you so much! T
Added to that number is the Statutory Adjustment, which is revenue that was generated by each agency or Ministry, ie school fees.
Special Warrants/Supplementary Estimates is the additional cash (or budget top-up) the Sask Party decided to allocate itself via the Ministry or agency over the course of the fiscal year.
Adding those three columns together results in the Revised Appropriation, or total amount of cash actually allocated to the Ministry or agency over the course of the fiscal year.
The rest is self explanatory. You’ll note that the final column doesn’t reflect the difference between reality and Budget Day, it reflects the difference between reality and the shell game they play with your money all year round.
As with all things Sask Party, the devil is always in the details.
A $174-million differential on a $14-billion Appropriation isn’t all that terrible.
It’s at each Ministry level where the bullshit become apparent.
In 2020-21, or the first full fiscal year of the pandemic, you can see where the Sask Party played the biggest games.
Every dollar goes a long way, thank you so much. - TamYou know exactly where all that Trade and Export money went - straight into private business. Remember, all roads lead back to the Sask Party’s top donors.
Yet the K-12 Education budget only went up 0.2% that year, with a whopping additional $10-mil allocated to the Ministry… yet when it was all said and done, the Ministry didn’t even spend almost $50-million on K-12 education that year.
In 2021-22 they ended up spending over $40-million less than they’d announced on Budget Day (the first column) in March of 2021.
Yet they handed Agriculture an additional $153-mil, most of which just went to research and programming.
I’m going to spare you a similar breakdown for revenue. Let’s just say the Sask Party isn’t all about overestimating on Budget Day how much you’re going to get fleeced in the coming fiscal year by some of the highest taxes this province has ever seen.
Point is, all governments politicize Budget Day, but like they do with everything, the Sask Party has taken the concept to new heights.
They gave themselves away years ago by predicting “Balanced Budgets” two and three years in advance - a strategy unequivocally proven as stupid as it is by both the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war.
So take today with a boulder of salt.
It’ll be paywalled, but I’ll be publishing on today’s budget release in the next day or two.
Talk to you then,
