Paul Martin Commentary
Evidence of the significant change Saskatchewan’s economy has undergone in the last quarter century was on display yesterday when the provincial finance minister delivered his budget for the coming fiscal year. It is making us something of an outlier right now.
BC, with five times our population, is projecting a deficit 14-times bigger than ours. Alberta, with four times our population, is looking at nearly 7-times our deficit. The only one that even comes close is Nova Scotia at $1.4 billion in the red for a million people.
Saskatchewan is the only province so far to come in under $1 billion at $819 million.
Our resource-based economy is more diversified than most. Alberta has oil. So do we. But we also have potash, uranium and the lion’s share of the nation’s agriculture sector. Oil’s been down but potash and uranium are not, providing us with a buffer that Alberta doesn’t have.
We also have large capital inflows to finance development of new mines and so on, projects that create a lot of jobs and support tax growth.
