The reviews are in

Murray Mandryk:

What was most disturbing about Thursday's mid-year Saskatchewan budget update wasn't the bungled $1.8-billion miscalculation of potash revenue, nor was it necessarily the throw-caution-to-the-wind decision to wager the equivalent of 20 per cent of our annual spending on a volatile resource at its apex and likely to face some level of decline.

It wasn't the startlingly unwise decision to spend the one-time sale of Saskferco assets to cover off the day-to-day operations of a government, nor was it the lack of anything vaguely resembling an austerity plan to deal with what might be another year of decline.

What was most disturbing wasn't even Finance Minister Rod Gantefoer's view through his rose-coloured, half-full glass that we can't have another year like we just had -- despite warning signs in his own mid-term report that things could be as bad in 2010-11 as they now are in 2009-10.

What was truly most disturbing was the complete and total lack of humility we saw from this Saskatchewan Party government, which should damn well be embarrassed by its own incompetence right now, rather than celebrating. Yes, celebrating.

We just witnessed Thursday a Saskatchewan finance minister present a mid-year budget update revealing that a surplus he forecast last March was now an overall $1.05-billion deficit. It's the biggest deficit since 1991-92 ($1.3 billion), when the provincial government was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and the second-biggest deficit ever.

And Gantefoer gets two standing ovations from his caucus colleagues in Thursday's question period? Are you kidding us? What is it about running government that you don't understand?