You are doing one hell of a job Brad Wall!

The apparent leak of a sealed court document for crassly partisan purposes is disgusting.

However it would probably also facilitate discussion if this thread had a slightly less crassly partisan title, or at least a title more appropriately focused on the topic. Did Brad Wall personally leak the document?

robbie_dee wrote:

Did Brad Wall personally leak the document?

No, of course not. It was the Saskatchewan courts. And who names judges to Saskatchewan courts? Stephen Harper.

I demand that this thread title be modified to replace "Brad Wall" with "Stephen Harper".

The buck stops there.

Building the “Saskatchewan Advantage”

Saskatchewan’s 2017 Austerity Budget

Saskatchewan's 2017 budget landed with an unenthusiastic thud last week. Riddled with cuts, job losses, public sector wage reductions, and tax increases, the Saskatchewan Party's austerity budget has garnered few friends, with critics ranging from organized labour movement to small businesses.[1] The government's budget has several fiscal goals: aggressively tackle its $1.3-billion deficit in three short years, overhaul the tax structure away from progressive forms of taxation to consumption taxes, and dismantle key aspects of the social welfare state.

In our view, Budget 2017 should be viewed in two ways. First, it is clearly a reactionary document drafted by an openly conservative government responding to the dramatic fall in natural resource prices that began in 2014. Second, and perhaps equally important, the budget is also a calculated political decision to exploit the fiscal crisis to further transform the provincial state to facilitate long-term private capital accumulation in the natural resource sector, keeping those sectors free from a burdensome tax regime or regulatory pressure. In other words, the government is using the fiscal crisis to push through the so-called “Saskatchewan Advantage,” which it defines as the province having “the lowest corporate tax rate and the lowest tax rate on manufacturing and processing in the country.”

quote:

Challenging the “Saskatchewan Advantage”

To date, opposition to the Saskatchewan Party has been largely waged by organized labour in response to wage reductions, job losses, and changes imposed upon the province's labour relations system. Notwithstanding a large labour organized demonstration outside the legislative assembly on 8 March, throughout the Saskatchewan Party's tenure, many of these struggles have been largely legal in nature and have not mustered serious community mobilization and rank-and-file activism. But now, with austerity and tax measures that will undoubtedly impact small towns and rural areas, the terrain of struggle might be shifting. With the amalgamation of health regions on the horizon, the winding down of the STC, cuts to education and libraries, and potential threats to municipal service levels, the space for broader opposition to austerity has widened.

Recent initiatives like SaskForward, which formed in 2017 as a means of constructing an alternative vision of “transformational change,” have brought together a coalition of civil society groups to work on charting a different political path for Saskatchewan. The Saskatchewan Federation of Labour has launched the Own It! campaign, designed to reach out across the labour movement to build a larger fight-back strategy and Unifor, CUPE, SEIU-West and SGEU have been vocal critics of the Saskatchewan Party's austerity agenda. Equally promising is that the Fight for $15 and Fairness movement that has been growing across North America has surfaced in the province. Meanwhile, the Saskatchewan Teachers Federation (STF) has remained virtually silent as their members face layoffs and significant funding cuts. Adding teachers to the chorus of anti-austerity efforts could create conditions for mass demonstrations against the government not unlike Ontario's Days of Action. If the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN) were to add their significant influence to the struggle by joining forces with healthcare unions already engaged in the fight, we are convinced that the movement would be a formidable obstacle to the government's austerity agenda.

Fightback against austerity is essential

Posted by The Stand Community Organizing Centre

There are moments in history where local politics have national, and even international, significance. Saskatchewan is currently living one of those moments.

Have no illusions. The recent provincial budget is about more than reducing government expenditures. It is an act of class warfare, and the beginning of a process of redefining the society you live in – massively reducing the social role of the state, and transferring yet more wealth to the already wealthy. There are three budgets left in the Sask Party’s current mandate and they will be worse than one just announced. They will be about ‘permanent austerity’, not short-term belt-tightening....

Images from protests around Saskatchewan after the release of the Saskatchewan budget in March 2017, which eliminated an essential transport service (STC) and dramatically cut funding to libraries and other services, while reducing corporate taxes and raising consumption taxes.

[url=http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/poll-lowest-sask-party-support-1... Party support drops below 50% for the first time ever in its mandate:[/url]

Quote:

Polling firm Insightrix says an unpopular budget has cost the Saskatchewan Party significant support.

A recent poll showed 44 per cent support for the governing party. 

It's a sharp drop from the 2016 election, where 62 per cent of voters cast their support for the party.

Not only. This affects a number of cities, including those in areas which traditionally support the Sask Party. The hardest hit is going to be Yorkton. The cuts aren't simply an attack on the presumed left. The library cuts and the STC cut is going to hurt people in rural areas far more than in the cities.

It is a combination of them covering their asses after squandering the province's savings, and using that mismanagement to implement ideological cuts. It is the same reason why they are trying to force school boards to ask teachers to come back to the table and renegotiate signed contracts. It really show how ignorant they are about how things work.

That is Brad Wall's constituency. I wish there was a vacancy there, but there is not.

We just had a byelection here in Saskatoon, which the NDP won from the Sask Party. It happened before the budget, and Wall refused to give an economic report prior to it. No surprise there.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

We just had a byelection here in Saskatoon, which the NDP won from the Sask Party. It happened before the budget, and Wall refused to give an economic report prior to it. No surprise there.

It's a seat with longstanding NDP support. Having said that, the last time the NDP did that well there was the height of their public popularity in the early 1990s, and having more seats is always better than not.

All Out to Stop the Cuts! Protest the Premier's Dinner!
Thursday, April 27 at 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Prairieland Park
503 Ruth St. Saskatoon

For anyone not familiar with the whole GTH scandal, this is worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq7Bn3gRREE

And Boyd is not the only one with a potential conflict of interest:

http://thestarphoenix.com/storyline/it-might-be-possible-that-even-premi...

And just last week we had that court ruling that will stop provincial funding for non-catholic students in catholic schools. So all those schools Wall just built - catholic and public schools joined at the hip - are kind of up in the air.

http://leaderpost.com/news/local-news/long-running-theodore-court-case-d...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/brad-wall-catholic-school-studen...

Now this:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/sask-party-passes-bill-to-sel...

Thing is, regardless of what Brad Wall claims once they sell more than 10 percent they are no longer publicly owned, and will have to pay corporate taxes.

They are going to ram through as much as they can, just like Devine did when he saw the writing on the wall, and wait for the next cycle when the NDP fixes what they can, and people forget.

At this point he is fucking over his own department of education. Fighting the lawsuit started by his own school boards, and trying to strongarm them into the impossible and unethical task of bringing teachers back to the table to renegotiate a signed contract.

..with video

Protesters swarm cars outside dinner event hosted by Sask. Premier Brad Wall

Hundreds of people from more than a dozen organizations rallied outside the Premier's Dinner venue in Saskatoon Thursday night, where Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall gave a keynote address. 

Protesters outside the event showed their opposition to cuts outlined in the 2017-2018 provincial budget. They began converging on Ruth Street, around Prairieland Park, before 5 p.m. CST.

The Premier's Dinner — an event hosted by the ruling Saskatchewan Party — was taking place at the park's Hall A.

Drivers on nearby Ruth Street found their cars blanketed by sign-waving protesters and organizers speaking through megaphones.

Some protesters even climbed atop some of the cars, causing tensions to rise....

And the police are saying that they were caught off guard and not properly prepared. Is that plausible? Will they look at the public opinion polls more closely and take that into account when dealing with public safety around protests targeting this government?

Panel discussion features unions talking about effects of provincial cuts

“People were getting mad at the CEO and VPs and human resources and I’m like, ‘They didn’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘How are we going to screw over our employees?’ They get their direction from the government so that’s who you’ve got to be upset with,” said Michelle Lang, president of PSAC local 4005.

Lang was a member of a panel who discussed how provincial cuts are affecting workers at the Regina and District Labour Council’s annual AGM on Saturday.

The panel was meant to inform other unions in both the public and private sector of what is currently happening in the province.

quote:

“(People are) waking up, they’re understanding. We actually have people contacting us through Facebook and through the local saying that, ‘I was at your rally. I want you guys to come out and speak again. We want your help on this,” she said.

However the sentiment throughout the panel and within the rest of the meeting was that there needs to be something more done. The unions feel the rallies that have been held lately have helped however they feel there should be a general strike held.

“Well it’s going to have to be planned and it has to be 100 per cent participation or else its not going to work,” Lang said.

A general strike would see all public sector employees who are members of unions not working for one day in order to show how important the work they do is for the province.

There hasn’t been any official plans made yet but the idea of a general strike has been talked about amongst union members and is possible to happen in the future.

“We’re not going to going to want to shut the province down totally we want to make sure that we do have hospitals and that running. I don’t know what it would (all) entail (currently),” Wilson said.

why does CBC do such a good job of investigating corruption in SK but not BC?

smith i was reading all about the huge "international" malls allegedly being built. 1 in Dundurn and another now in Regina. we'd never get reporting like this in BC 

I also don't think that the CBC does a good job of representing positions in favour of our crowns and reasons not to privatize. 

It is a good thing to remember. Alternative media is important, but it really does not have the same resources that mainstream media does to put reporters on a story for months, and to finance access to information requests and lawyers. That is part of the reason why, as spotty as its record is, institutions like the CBC are important.

Misfit wrote:

I also don't think that the CBC does a good job of representing positions in favour of our crowns and reasons not to privatize.

Chanelling Alanis Morisette:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jne9t8sHpUc

Sask. school workers say 'it's an absolute no' to 3.5% pay cut

Saskatchewan school caretakers, educational assistants and library workers say they will not accept wage cuts being demanded by the provincial government. 

"This is horrible," said Jackie Christianson, who represents 7,000 school support workers through the Canadian Union of Public Employees. "I have members who are using the food bank."....

Coward.

I don't believe he speaks French. Unlikely.

As for running them off, if that happens it is not for another four years. That's a lot of time to sell the farm to their business friends.

For all his folksy charm act the talk today was that he may go down as a lot worse than Grant Devine. At least he left some infrastructure behind. Wall basically wasted a huge surplus and has done nothing but sell off, tear down, and rip off.

Plus he makes these deep cuts and then promptly quits so someone else can deal with the problem.