What Did the Sask Party Spend $1.7mil Per Day On Last Year?

Hint: you probably didn't use it.

If you haven’t been to a Budget Day address in the Saskatchewan Legislature, rest assured you’re not missing much, though it is definitely a show.

Each MLA is allowed to invite a certain number of attendees to sit in the Assembly for the Finance Minister’s speech. After the pomp and ceremony wraps up, everybody floods into the Rotunda (the landing at the top of the Legislature’s foyer stairs). All local media outlets are stationed there, jockeying for interviews with the Premier, the Opposition leader, the CEO of the Saskatchewan Heavy Construction Association blah blah bladdy blah.

It’s all such a farce.

By sundown, which in March is still before dinner, the place has cleared out. The Sask Party’s elite guests - a who’s-who of government contract holders - disperse to the various cabinet ministers offices, or the premier’s, for coffee, tea and munchies… or something stronger.

Once upon a time, when the Saskatchewan government was at least somewhat honest and did its job, the Budget Day exercise was important. You could assume, to at least an extent, that some honest effort was made in the Ministry of Finance, by actual money experts and accountants, to create something with integrity.

Today, the budget is a complete work of fiction, written for populists by populists, with no intention of actually following it. There is no plan - the Sask Party hemorrhages tax dollars on what it wants, when it wants it.

What comes out the other end, to account for what the Sask Party government spent during the previous fiscal year, is a massive report called Public Accounts Volume 1. Volume 1 is typically released in late June and broadly breaks down the province’s finances for the previous fiscal year.