Saskatchewan, THIS Is Your Billion Dollar Surplus
And a pretty cool new special offer from Substack for paid subscribers. Get the details at the bottom of the post.
The Sask Party Insider piece I wanted to publish this week isn’t finished yet, so thought I’d drop you a line on taxes.
Once upon a time, when Saskatchewan governments were relatively honest (there was at least an eighteen-month window between 1992 and 1995) (kidding) (not really), when there was a healthy, functional Official Opposition in the Legislature and newsrooms were stacked with reporters and properly resourced, you didn’t need to hunt down this information or rely on a obscure little website like this one to provide it.
You could count on it to come to you.
As we all know, those days are gone.
It took me a long time - years - to figure out where and how to maneuver through the monolithic and often deliberately confusing government systems that are home to the information you need in order to participate in a stable democracy and promote healthy Saskatchewan communities.
I see your frustration over feeling like you don’t know where your tax dollars are going. I hear your stories of confronting Sask Party MLAs and asking about, for example, how much education property tax is being collected and where it goes every year.
Today I’m going to fast-track your learning curve, providing you with a little map to where the information you are owed as a Saskatchewan resident and taxpayer can be found.
Scott Moe’s “oNE BilLioN dOLlar SuRPLus”
You’ve heard it about a billion times already - the Sask Party raucously congratulating itself at every opportunity for the fact that they intend to get through the fiscal 2023-24 year by raking in a billion dollars more than they’re going to spend.
The audacity is breathtaking.
Cause where do you think they’re getting that extra billion dollars?
Well, it must be from their political donors. The Sask Party are fiscal wunderkinds, just ask them.
If not that, it’s from Scott Moe personally stimulating the hell out of the economy, right?
Wrong.
Meet Scott Moe’s “billion dollar surplus”, Saskatchewan:
This year Saskatchewan residents are forecast to pay $2.4-billion in PST, which is twice as much as you paid six years ago in 2016-17.
Or in other words, just over one billion dollars more.
‘Surely that can’t be more than what we’re raking in from oil and gas,’ I hear you thinking.
Oh honey, it so can.
It’s you.
You are the billion dollar surplus.
The Sask Party government is grabbing twice as much money out of your pocket as it was the year before Scott Moe was elected to replace Brad Wall. Scooter is doing nothing more than pillaging your bank account while congratulating himself for making the provincial government wealthy.
The audacity of the Sask Party to pull this crap - suggesting they are somehow responsible for a cash windfall, when they’re really just robbing you - makes it clear that they are well aware that they have no real Official Opposition and face no actual media scrutiny. It’s not even that long ago when that kind of boldfaced political lie would have been pulled apart and debunked the same day it surfaced.
What it should also tell you is what the Sask Party thinks of you: you’re stupid. That they don’t even need to respect you enough to tell you the truth, because how would you ever know the difference?
Meanwhile, your personal income tax has also enjoyed a less steep but still defined ascent in recent years.
The steady, guiding hand of the Sask Party must mean the revenue from all the business they’ve stimulated by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to jet Scoots to Europe, India and Asia has increased similarly… right?
Wrong.
Tell me, please, what the point is of the Sask Party’s singular focus on creating opportunities for private corporations if it’s not to generate revenue for the Government of Saskatchewan?
Revenue that’s supposed to pay for things like your roads, Kindergarten to Grade 12 education and keeping you alive.
If not in corporate taxes, then resource revenue must be where all the money is hiding that the Sask Party is generating for Saskatchewan.
Ummmm… no.
It’s almost as if there are external forces, perhaps even global factors that are pushing and pulling resource revenue in whatever direction it’s going to go, no matter what interventions or schemes the Sask Party dreams up.
Friends, your wallet is the only reliable source of revenue the Sask Party government can inflate, artificially or otherwise, to meet its power-grabbing, corrupt needs.
While it still doesn’t fully fund education, your property is another cash cow for the Sask Party.
The Sask Party decided a decade ago that they will be managing that revenue, which is supposed to fund K-12 education, instead of Saskatchewan school boards where it used to go directly.
As we know, that’s worked out about as well as expected.
Some of this information is available, though buried pretty deep, on the Government of Saskatchewan’s website. Bookmark this link if you’re into that kind of thing.
The figures provided on the Sask Party government’s website notably do not include individual or corporate income tax. Those I had to extract from fifteen years of Public Accounts Volume 1, which you can find on the government’s incredibly imperfect publications website by searching for that title (include the specific year if required).
Public Accounts Volume 1 contains the government’s audited financial statements for the previous fiscal year. It usually comes out mid-year. It is where you’ll find, for example, information on how much property tax was collected and how much was spent on education (spoiler alert: property tax does not come close to fully-funding K-12.)
Public Accounts Volume 2 for the previous fiscal year comes out at the end of the calendar year. Volume 2 is where you can find the details on things like which Saskatchewan corporations, both for and non-profit, received government payments. You can search for Volume 2 on the publications website as well.
Anyway, point is that their “billion dollar surplus” is really just every man, woman and child being forced to hand the Sask Party government $1000 more than it needs to operate.
Now about that offer Substack launched early this past week.
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The information I put out here is as airtight as I can get it and always backed up by facts. It’s not my job to make the government or anyone else look good and it’s not my problem if fact-based truths make them look bad.
Because that’s what it’s always been about: the truth. The truth is what matters. The ongoing decline of mainstream media and in political discourse means the onus is becoming increasingly placed on private and individual writers and researchers to get it out there.
Saskatchewan is worth saving. Restoring a healthy and productive democracy is key if we want a future for our province that is built for everyone to succeed, not just wealthy and elite Sask Party supporters. I will never tell you how to vote, but I will do everything I can to ensure you have the most and best information to do so democratically.
So, thank you for helping get the word out about Our Sask! I’m looking forward to seeing the results from this new offer. I have the best audience in Canada.
I’ll be back with an Insider post as well as a look at the Saskatchewan Auditor’s most recent report next week.
In the meantime have a great weekend,
