Two weeks before the resumption of the Saskatchewan Legislature and a month before the anticipated release of a 2024-2025 Saskatchewan budget, Cabinet has passed a series of special warrants worth hundreds of millions of dollars. These special warrants are a method of obtaining an approved appropriation (authorization to spend money). They are normally used when “…the Legislative Assembly is not or will not be in session for some time…”

https://www.fin.gov.nt.ca/en/glossary/special-warrant

Can the time period between now and the opening of the Saskatchewan Legislature on March 4, 2024 be legitimately defined as “…not in session for some time”? Your call.

Special Warrants are generally used in instances where there is some element of urgency that would require approval of spending without scrutiny by the legislative body.

Each signed Order in Council is preceded by a boiler-plate summary like this one, for the Ministry of Energy and Resources:

Translating that into people-speak, you’ve gone and spent all the money we gave you, but you urgently need to buy/fix/launch something we weren’t counting on when we released the initial funds in the budget back in March of 2023.

Notable additional expenditures this time around include $215m more for the SHA, $22m more for the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency (diagnostic and treatment trips to other jurisdictions??) and $200m for Physician Services (probably the new physician contract).

Notable as well is $114,785,000 for the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Energy and Resources for “remediation of contaminated sites” reopening the perennial can of worms about whether companies are being sufficiently held accountable when they leave behind a big mess.

Here are the details:

Ministry of Health: $450,100,000

Ministry of Education: $16,000,000

Ministry of Parks, Culture and Sport: $1,824,000

Government Relations: $17,688,000

Ministry of Highways: $23,400,000

Ministry of Social Services: $22,750,000

Corrections, Policing and Public Safety: $8,968,000

Justice and Attorney General: $1,664,000

Ministry of Agriculture: $86,321,000

Saskatchewan Research Council: $5,000,000

Ministry of Environment: $20,285,000

Energy and Resources: $94,500,000

SaskBuilds and Procurement: $8,995,000

The grand total? $757,495,000. That means the budget and Estimates table this past spring were off by just a bit over three-quarters of a billion dollars.

Now, some might say I’m not being very generous and compared to spending of over $18 billion in the last budget, this additional spending borders on the insignificant.

However, they were out by four percent, which is a reminder that budget making at the provincial level is a human endeavor. It involves assumptions, forecasts and more than a bit of guesswork.

All Special Warrants and Cabinet Orders in Council are always available for public review at the following website: https://publications.saskatchewan.ca/#/categories/6156

Documents relating to the 2023-2024 Saskatchewan Provincial Budget are found here:

https://www.saskatchewan.ca/government/budget-planning-and-reporting/budget-2023-24/news-releases