Len Taylor

   Chiropractic Services may be deinsured

On Tuesday March 9^th the SaskParty government telegraphed what could be the first of many cuts to Saskatchewan health care that will appear in the provincial budget scheduled for Wednesday March 24^th.

During Question Period in the Legislature, Health Minister Don McMorris indicated that chiropractic services could be deinsured by the Brad Wall government which if it happens would likely mean a)higher individual costs for people who use the services of a Chiropractor b) higher costs to the health care system as a whole as people who would normally seek pain relief from a chiropractor will now seek remedies from hospital emergency rooms c) increased waiting times for doctors in their offices and at the hospital as more people seek pain relief from their family doctors, and d) increased costs to employee health plans as the increased costs are passed on to the insurance companies serving those who benefit from such plans.

The Questions, raised by NDP Health Critic Judy Junor (Saskatoon Eastview) suggested that the government of Premier Brad Wall is transferring to seniors, farm families, low income workers, and ordinary Saskatchewan residents who rely on chiropractic services to relieve pain the costs of the government’s financial mismanagement during the past year.

The president of the province’s chiropractors association, Dr. Shane Taylor of Regina said chiropractors across the province have been anticipating this move for a couple of weeks and have already collected 15,000 signatures on petitions asking the Wall government to maintain their funding of chiropractic services.

To make matter worse, in the Legislature, Junor pointed out that the SaskParty government had earlier this year negotiated and reached agreement on a new payment schedule with chiropractors which would have continued the insured services and had, in fact, gone so far as to draft a media release confirming that an agreement had been reached. Just before an announcement was made the SaskParty government backed out of the deal and are now saying chiropractors and their patients must wait until budget day to find out if their agreement will be funded or not.

Health Minister McMorris, in the Legislature said there are numerous health services for which Saskatchewan residents have to pay out of pocket and therefore deinsuring the services of a chiropractic visit would not be setting a precedent. He also indicated that it is not unusual for a government to negotiate a contract and then wait to see if it can be funded.

In his exact words, McMorris said: “We also supply a number of services that aren’t dictated to us through the Canada Health Act. Some are subsidized. Some are covered completely, and chiropractic services would fall under that category, so would ambulance services, so would long-term care, so would home care. Many of these services are subsidized by government. They aren’t dictated by the Canada Health Act. We have to look at all of those services and decide whether we should cover them or not.”

What is disturbing about this is that the same process if followed for other health related services such as those provided by ambulance operators across the province, who also provide a “co-pay” service negotiated by operators and the government would also result in a loss of services and increased costs to Saskatchewan people. McMorris has left the door open for the government to withdraw from negotiated agreements and push more costs onto Saskatchewan most vulnerable residents.

In addition to this concern, other health care cuts which could find their way into the March 24^th budget include the Seniors Drug Plan and the services provided by Home Care workers throughout Saskatchewan.

The Minister of Finance will likely argue that all this is necessary because the sales of potash are down, but we can’t let him and the Premier forget that it was their mismanagement of these revenues that put the province into a deficit position in the first place, and in spite of this the province’s revenues from all other sources are higher than ever before. Governments do have to make choices and when the Premier says he has to make tough choices look carefully and what his other choices are when he abandons seniors and hard working Saskatchewan residents with cuts to health care services.

Comments on the closing of the fall session of the Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly December 3, 2009

After sitting through the fall session I am more concerned than ever about the future ability of our provincial government to manage tax payer’s money, plan and support what should be a growing economy, and protect vulnerable people from the affects of both community growth, and government spending cuts.

This was a session that pointed out clearly the Wall Government’s mismanagement of the province’s financial resources and highlighted the fact that Brad Wall inherited a provincial treasury worth $2.3 billion and in just two years took Saskatchewan to a $1 billion deficit.

For the provincial treasury, it’s been “boom to bust” in just two short years. How did Saskatchewan get in this predicament? Two words come to mind, mismanagement and incompetence.

While there was virtually no substantive legislation introduced for debate and certainly not much of that was passed, there was an acknowledgement that the Wall government was going to have to break a lot of its election promises because of their financial mismanagement.

Let’s not forget the budget introduced in March ’09 called for 20% of provincial revenues to come from Potash sales. This was forecast to be $1.8 billion, but the return for the province turned out to be just slightly more than $100 million. Regardless of the failure of the government to budget properly, other revenues (such as the PST) continued to roll in and the government continued to spend (it planned to spend 32% more in 2009/10 than in 2008/09) as if it had no revenue challenges. Now, in the last few months of the year, the Wall government is trying to correct its mistakes, and as a result they are going to break promises, cut services and programs, and put off capital spending for a period of time that nobody can adequately predict.

For example, it now appears that municipalities will not get the revenue sharing funding they were promised meaning that local property tax will have to increase. It appears that school boards will not get the funding they were promised which will likely lead to rural school closures, a reduction in classroom programs, and perhaps no support for increased teachers salaries which are due to be put into place for 2010. It appears that the continuation of education property tax relief will not be forthcoming meaning that homeowners expecting a reduction in their education portion of property tax will not see this, and therefore they will be facing what is really a property tax increase.

And, let’s not forget that the Children’s Hospital will not proceed as planned, and 13 long-term care homes for seniors in rural Saskatchewan, including one planned for Meadow Lake will also not proceed as planned. Other projects such as the replacement of Saskatchewan Hospital will only proc3eed as “funds become available” and as such are considered in jeopardy given that funds will likely not become available for some years to come.

A University of Saskatchewan Economics Profession, Eric Howe, known for his conservative views was quoted in late November saying: “If you look just three years ago, the provincial government in Saskatchewan had revenue of about eight billion dollars and nonetheless had a surplus of nearly one billion dollars. Now, in 2009 even with the low values of potash revenues the Saskatchewan provincial government has a revenue of ten billion dollars … and is running the second largest deficit in the history of the province … I don’t accept at all that there is a problem here, in terms of there not being enough money.”

In reality, expenditures in Saskatchewan are up for the 2009/10 fiscal year by 32%. At a time when revenues actually increased year over year, despite the potash blunder, spending increased at a much greater rate than revenues and the Wall government finds that it has had to run a deficit, skim more money out of the province’s savings account and its Crown Corporations, and cut or defer capital spending programs all over the province. It is this type of mismanagement and incompetence that did in the Devine Conservative government in 1991.
All in all, this was a disastrous session for the Wall government and the people of Saskatchewan. Thanks to questioning from the opposition New Democrats it was clearly established that before year end the Wall government will make $293 million worth of cuts to programs, services and infrastructure. This will affect thousands of families who will now pay the price for Wall’s reckless budgeting and out of control spending.

This is also just the tip of the iceberg as this government must now go into meetings to devise next year’s budget. They have already identified a spending problem that will continue into next year, they have identified a lot of expensive projects that they have deferred into next year, and they don’t have any idea of what revenue will be available to them. This situation is unprecedented. It can only mean more broken promises, more cuts, and even fewer services and programs for Saskatchewan people.

If you are expecting a significant reduction in the education portion of your property tax this year, my guess is that you are about to be disappointed.

Of course this shouldn’t come as a great surprise, but it does show that Premier Brad Wall and his SaskParty government are finding that keeping this major election promise is proving harder to deliver on than they first thought.

And, also of course, it proves Agriculture Minister Bob Bjonerud’s recent comments - that they could say anything they wanted in opposition, but now that they are in government they have to be more responsible.

We know the issue of education property tax relief is still very important because it was raised a couple of times during the past two weeks, especially at the early February meeting of the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association (SUMA) in Saskatoon. Brad Wall and company were reminded that they promised significant relief, that they have spent the last year and a half studying the issue further, and that they have financial resources available that no government before them had,

The best response Wall’s education minister, Ken Krawetz could come up with is that education property tax relief is a government priority, but it is also a “competing priority” which means that when there are provincial tax dollars to be spent, education tax relief is just one of many issues that the new cabinet will consider. Some former English teachers out there would argue that something that is a “priority” is something at the top of a list, not one of just many items on a list.

To be fair, this is a big ticket item and everybody (even Brad Wall) knew that a permanent transfer of up to $700 million a year from the property tax base to the provincial tax base was not going to be easy. Five years ago the provincial government sponsored study recommended raising the PST to cover a portion of the cost. The NDP rejected that idea and it would appear that Wall and company will do the same.

The SaskParty gave Rostown area MLA, Jim Reiter the task of studying how the new government should handle the issue. The first week of February Reiter presented his report (which took more than a year to complete) to the Education Minister (Krawetz). It now appears that this report will be kept secret untill after the provincial budget, expected around March 18th, and may in fact never be released. No one in government is expecting this provincial budget to signal any significant relief.

It is interesting to note that while Reiter says it is hard for the provincial government to assume all the costs necessary to provide significant relief because “oil is at $40 a barrel and not $140 a barrel”, but he conveniently forgets that when the SaskParty started calling for significant relief from the former NDP government, oil was between $20 and $30 a barrel. If the SaskParty thought the provincial government could manage tax relief when oil was at $20 a barrel, they should have no issue with managing a solution when oil is almost double what it was at that time.

This is an issue that the people of Saskatchewan feel strongly about. Therefore there could be no better time for the people of Saskatchewan to contact their local SaskParty MLAs and ask them to be sure to include significant education property tax relief (as they promised they would do) in the provincial budget coming down in mid-March. And while you are at it, ask them to publically release the Reiter report, so we can all see what they’ve been thinking for the last year and a half. Brad Wall has a promise to keep.

The initial reaction to the new federal government budget of January 27th is interesting. Some people worry about the newly created large budget deficit and the lack of a concrete plan to eventually get it under control: some like the idea of personal tax breaks and tax credits for renovations; others are concerned that those who need help the most have been largely ignored.

This isn’t unusual given that everybody sees the current national econmic situation differently depending on the circumstances in their life.

But, here in Saskatchewan, lets remember - we had a list of priorities going into the budget planning process - and we should judge the content of the federal budget against what we were looking for before we knew what was going to be in it.

Saskatchewan has a few needs that we wanted addressed. There is a crisis in the forestry sector (just ask the people in Prince Albert, Big River, Meadow Lake, Hudson Bay, and Nipawin), and in the livestock sector. These industries are affected by the downtown in the global economy just as much as the auto sector is affected. We in Saskatchewan were looking for help.

Job losses continue to take place even in our well-performing provincial economy, especially in the oil patch, and in the potash communities. New investment dollars are decreasing, and we continue to have a job shortage for industries or sectors that continue to perform well.

Also, our municipalities (cities, towns, RMs) have infrastructure projects ready to go and Mayors and Reeves asked to have federal funds flow directly to them, quickly and easily. Here in The Battlefords we’ve been waiting more than 2 years for our request for federal funds in support of our proposed multipurpose facility.

And, lastly, for some of us at least, we were looking for Ottawa to better respect our provincial resource revenues and leave more of the royalties received for use inside Saskatchewan.

So, how did the federal budget match-up to our expressed needs.

a) likely little new funding will reach those most affected in our forestry communities.

b) Ag funding will help further diversify livestock sector but there is unlikely any direct support for the cow/calf operator which is where the real hurt is.

c) Resource sector has been largely left to fend for themselves.

d) Municipalities will have more money for infrastructure, but they still must apply for help and someone in Ottawa will decide if the project warrants funding or not - and still no specific recognition that The Battlefords Multipurpose proposal warrants any federal funding.

e) No recognition of Saskatchewan’s request for a change in the equalization formula or the development of an Energy Accord similar to that which exists for Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia. This was a promise broken in the last election and is costing Saskatchewan about $800 million a year. In this recession just imagine how important those funds could be if the national economy doesn’t improve soon.

There are other things as well - such as the need for more affordable housing, expecially for seniors, that doesn’t appear to be easy to find in this budget.

So in summary - it is clear that Saskatchewan greatest needs were not addressed by Ottawa on January 27th. Despite the fact that 13 of 14 federal seats are held by the governing Conservatives (including the Agriculture Minister who has to know the problems in the cattle industry). We seem to have been ignored or worse, taken for granted.

Saskatchewan’s economy is giving us some breathing room (we’ll see how well we are doing when the provincial budget comes down around March 18th), but let’s hope that our economic success doesn’t put us first in line to help pay off this large federal debt that appears to be primarily for the benefit for the residents of other provinces.