The provincial government says its budget for 2019-2020 is going to be balanced.
And that’s a reason to be pleased.
After several years of deficit budgets, the government handed down a balanced budget on Wednesday. It’s certainly a stark contrast to the federal budget, which is rife with red ink. (A deficit of nearly $20 billion, continuing a trend we’ve seen from this Liberal government since they were elected in 2015).
As for what’s in the provincial budget, you can’t accuse the provincial government of lavish spending. This is not a budget that’s rife with big-ticket spending projects or large capital projects. But it also doesn’t have big tax increases or massive spending cuts to have balance.
Instead, we are looking at a budget that addresses a few high-profile projects, with money for health, education, social programs and highways.
For the government to balance the budget in this day and age, it has to be smart. These aren’t the milk and honey days of the boom years. But revenues are still at $15 billion, which is up from $14.3 million in 2018-19.
And the surplus of $34.4 million doesn’t leave much margin for error. If the provincial taxation revenues or the royalty revenues are off by just a little bit, then the government will either have to find a way to balance the budget, or admit defeat and have a deficit budget, and with an election looming, no less.
(And with a large increase in budgeted royalty revenues, the government appears to be ambitious on that front).
It’s good to see that the budget has a tax break for volunteer firefighters and ambulance technicians. We’ll be interested to see how the new potash royalty regime works out.
But there are also a lot of items not in the budget that people would like to see.
Would we have liked to have seen a commitment to build a new nursing home in Estevan? Absolutely. And while Estevan isn’t the only community in the province in need of a long-term care facility, we’d be surprised if there are many facilities that need to be replaced more than the Estevan Regional Nursing Home.
The staff at the nursing home is dedicated and works hard, but they’re doing the best they can in an antiquated building that needed to be replaced years ago.
And so we’re going to be waiting at least another year for a new nursing home, even though the new nursing home committee has done their part by presenting alternatives to the provincial government to have a new facility constructed.
While few in Estevan have been accused of being fans of passing lanes, we’re pleased to see that the government is going to at least proceed with its plan to construct passing lanes and twinning between Estevan and Regina.
At least the government did the right thing when it decided not to tinker with the province’s regional libraries system. There had been speculation that the government might move to a single library region, similar to what it did with the health regions.
Perhaps the government remembered the public’s reaction from two years ago when they slashed library funding. The opposition was so strong the government had no choice but to restore funding.
But the budget is balanced. The government will take in more money than it spends. And this is hopefully the way it’s going to be moving forward.
We can’t afford to move in and out of balanced budgets.
