Sask. Cabinet approves special warrants worth $757,495,000.

| Ian Hanna

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

There are no private meetings

| Ian Hanna

In the weeks and months before an election, there is no such thing as a private meeting or off-the-record comments, as the UK Labour Party discovered recently when one of its candidates made some objectionable comments.

“There are even those who reckon it “a kind of blessing in disguise” because it has given a vivid warning to the party’s candidates to engage brain before opening mouth and to remember that there is no such thing as a truly “private” meeting. I’m sceptical that everyone will learn the lesson. It will not be at all surprising if secret recordings with incendiary content released at a time designed to cause maximum disruption are a feature of the general election campaign. History suggests it will not just be Labour that has made some unwise candidate selections.”

Andrew Rawnsley
Guardian
18 February 2024

Zealous recycling in Berlin

| Ian Hanna

From today’s Sunday Times, a story about community recycling monitoring taken to the extreme:

In Berlin every block of flats has a communal bin house where you separate paper and cardboard, bio waste and Wertstoffe (all other recyclables). “There’s a fair bit of peer pressure to recycle properly,” says Oliver Moody, our Berlin correspondent. “The state of the bins and the assiduity of the sorting probably account for a solid quarter of the messages in our local WhatsApp group.” When a sleep-deprived Moody (accidentally) left a used nappy in the wrong bin, it caused a scandal. “We were singled out as dreckspatzen or ‘dirt-sparrows’.”

Sunday Times, London
18 February 2024

Billboards slamming teachers were being planned well before the start of collective bargaining.

| Ian Hanna

Today’s Regina Leader Post features an interesting story on the timing of billboards on teacher negotiations, paid for with tax dollars by Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Education.

The story, by reporter Larissa Kurz, can be found here:

https://leaderpost.com/news/local-news/sask-politics/sask-party-billboards-indicate-province-preparing-for-a-fight-with-stf-prof

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Between June 2023 and November 2023, the Ministry of Education spent $145,000 on billboards and digital advertising. The money came from a public education fund set up for the government-trustee bargaining committee; in other words, dollars from taxpayers.

The billboards outline the government’s opening salary offer of seven percent, then go on to describe the average salary for a Saskatchewan teacher as $92,000, which the government claims is “more than others in Western Canada”. It is the position of the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation that this is a misrepresentation of teachers’ earnings.

The Federation used Saskatchewan’s Freedom of Information and Privacy Act to request further information on the total cost of the advertising campaign, all communications planning documents related to the campaign including Key Performance Indicators, strategic direction, key messages and budget breakdowns.

What came back was a heavily redacted set of emails, starting with one between a local Regina advertising agency that does work for several government ministries, sent to an official in Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Education.

The first email is dated June 21, 2023. The next email, dated June 23, 2023 has the subject line “ad campaign”.

(In the interests of maintaining some semblance of a relationship with officials in the Ministry of Education, I’ve left out the names of those who received the email.)

Despite the fact government has chosen to wipe out all of the content in the body of the email, the dates and subject lines are still interesting.

It seems planning for the billboards began no later than June 21, and likely well before that date.

However, opening proposals were not presented until meetings held on June 28 and 29th. That means the planning for the billboards began even before the two sides had exchanged proposals.

The Leader Post article quotes Charles Smith, an associate professor of political studies at the University of Saskatchewan.

Smith says whether the government is guilty of bargaining in bad faith is up to Saskatchewan’s Labour Relations Board. However, Smith says government appears to have been preparing these ads long before negotiations broke down.

“I think you can make a credible argument that there is an orchestrated campaign that is not interested in getting a deal done, and that could be evidence of bad faith.”

Prof. Charles Smith
Regina Leader Post
16 February 2024

The Leader Post article also quotes STF President Samantha Becotte who says “I truly believe they have never come to the bargaining table with the intention of negotiating in good faith.”

In a subsequent news release dated February 16, 2024, the STF advised teachers and members of the public to expect an escalation in job sanctions.

At issue is the government’s refusal to discuss teacher working conditions and student learning conditions. It is the position of the STF that class size (number of student) and classroom complexity (the nature, scope and scale of challenges facing individuals) should be part of the language in a new collective agreement.

“Unless they are willing to return to the table and actually negotiate, we have no choice but to continue using the tools available to us to hold them accountable. We know that this is a difficult and stressful situation for families. We want to give them as much notice as we can so that families can prepare. If you are tired of this, as we are, please call your local school board trustee and MLA to voice your concerns.”

Samantha Becotte, President
STF News Release dated 16 February 2024

The entire news release can be found here:

https://www.stf.sk.ca/about-stf/news/teachers-advise-to-expect-escalation-in-job-sanctions