MOOSOMIN — After 17 years serving as an 小蓝视频 for the Humboldt-Watrous constituency, minister of finance since 2017 and the deputy premier for the last four years, Donna Harpauer has delivered her final provincial budget. She’s one of 10 sitting 小蓝视频s not seeking re-election this year.
Surrounded by colleagues in the Saskatchewan Party, friends and family members (including a grandchild just eight days old), Harpauer took a breath and began her budget presentation.
“It is my honour today to present the 2024-25 Saskatchewan budget, our government’s 17th budget and my seventh budget as finance minister,” she said on the afternoon of March 20.
The $19.9 billion revenue forecast for the 2024-25 budget is up $184.2 million from last year. The increase is primarily due to growth in all revenue categories, except non-renewable resources largely due to the moderation of potash prices.
Total expense is projected at $20.1 billion in the 2024-25 Budget, an increase of $1.5 billion, or 7.9 per cent, over last year’s budget.
The 2024-25 Budget has a projected deficit of $273.2 million but is expected to return to a surplus position in 2025-26 due to increasing revenues driven by a growing population, labour force and economy.
The 2024-25 Budget supports students and teachers through a record investment of $3.3 billion for the Ministry of Education, up 8.1 per cent over last year’s budget. This is an increase of $247.8 million to support Prekindergarten to Grade 12 students, early learning, child care and libraries.
Saskatchewan’s 27 school divisions will receive $2.2 billion in school operating funding for the 2024-25 school year—a record increase of $180.0 million, or an 8.8 per cent increase over the previous year.
The budget provides the Saskatchewan Health Authority with nearly $4.7 billion, including an operating increase of $248.3 million, or a 5.6 per cent increase compared to last year.
The 2024-25 Budget includes an increase of $5.1 million for specialized medical imaging services to add essential CT and MRI capacity in the province.
The World-Spectator spoke with Harpauer after the budget last week:
This was the last budget that you presented. What were your thoughts in that moment, as you were presenting that last budget?
I did not allow my mind to go to the fact that this was the last budget, so I wouldn’t get sentimental. I just thought, ‘I’m delivering the budget, just like always,’ and I’ll let that all sink in once I get done the whole circuit afterwards; that this is indeed the last budget. I wish it was balanced, but I do feel very confident and comfortable with what we chose to do.
When you’ve got a growing province, which we do, then you’ve got more kids in classrooms, you’ve got more people needing health care, so you’ve got to step up and address that and be there for those. But what is exciting is when you’ve got a growing province, and you’ve got some pretty substantive investments committed to our province. The economy going forward will be critical, and I think it will happen to support those higher expenditures.
The title of your budget is “Classrooms, Care & Communities.” How do you think this budget will affect change in general for our province over the next year?
All of those things, and another thing investors look at are quality of life for their workers, right? So we need to attract those workers, and in order to do so we have to have the quality of life that they need—education for the kids and health care for their family members. So it’s not one thing that fixes everything, it is the whole package.
So I think going forward, it’s going to affect the province in that having that there will attract even more investment, and attracting even more investment means more revenue for the province to maintain and sustain what we’ve got. It becomes self-sustaining going forward, and that’s going to be really critical.
I remember from your comments yesterday, that we’re starting in a deficit position, but you’re anticipating ending on a positive note, and you made reference to the resource industry as playing a huge role in that positive growth.
It truly does, it plays a massive amount and I’m hoping that the next finance minister uses it towards that! But you know, as you have more people, you have more people buying stuff, and that means more PST.
The construction we’re going to see this summer is going to be exciting. Those are fairly high-paying jobs in our trades, and so then you’ve got higher income tax 小蓝视频 paid. It all ends up sustaining itself.
As you touched on construction, in the Moosomin area, we have a pretty big boom going on—$52 million in the area alone in construction. What in the budget, going forward, do you think will encourage that rural growth in communities?
Just talking to different investors and that I do have the privilege of meeting with, what they look for is, as I said, they want to look at, basically, tax stability. They want to know if they’re going to invest millions—and I’ve got BHP in my area with the big potash mine—if they’re going to invest those kinds of dollars, they want to know that the government is stable; that it’s not going to quickly turn on a dime and start raising taxes because they have to do their business plan based on the tax regime that they’re going to invest into. So that’s why all of that becomes very critical and not everybody knows that it goes beyond just having the feedstock you need for what you want to do.
You’ve got to have a stable business environment before they’re going to make a massive investment.
It must be difficult to hammer out a budget when everybody’s ask is so important.
Everybody just assumes that there’s a ton of money out there that they can get!
After 17 years, how do you think you’re leaving the books? Do you think you’re leaving Saskatchewan finances better than when you first came in?
What I think I will be able to have pride in is that there’s stability. Keeping in mind I was the Finance Minister through a pandemic, where basically the economy was shut down. So we had that massive swing. I was the Finance Minister when we had the largest catastrophic drought in agriculture, which is a huge industry in our province. So I got to live through that swing. But now that I’m projecting a more normal year, the foundation of our budget’s solid, and we have three revenue sources—we’ve got taxes, we’ve got resource revenue, and we have transfers on the federal government, which of course, they can do because they collect taxes from us as well.
We need to base our expenses a very limited amount on the resource revenue, because resource revenues go up and down. It’s so volatile. So I want to keep budgets—and I’ve really stressed that with my government colleagues—of less than 15 per cent to be reliant on resource revenue. And above that, we need to invest it somewhere else than a one-time spend and I’ve been able to basically entrench that into our psyche. And happy to note in this budget, only 13.5 per cent of the expenses are paid for by resource revenues, so that when resource revenues go down, you’re not devastated. You’re not scrambling for where the money’s going to come from.
I think overall, we’re positioned with our resource sector and everything taken into account, we’re on the cusp of something huge.
I couldn’t agree with you more!
One statistic that was mentioned yesterday was that you’ve delivered the most budgets by a single provincial Finance Minister in 60 years—what is your thought on that?
Someone asked me ‘how many budgets this?’ and I didn’t know! Well, now I know—seven that’s crazy! But I loved it. I really do. I’ve loved this position, it’s been such an honour to have had the confidence of my government on keeping me here.
So what does life after politics look like?
I don’t know. I said to some people, the first thing I’m going to do is read a book that’s meaningless, that I do not have to memorize it, analyze it, or fix the problem! And after that, I’ll find something. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t see myself just doing nothing.
