On safety concerns

One of the great mysteries of Scott Moe’s tenure in power is how he’s evaded scrutiny for a personal track record which has demonstrated a gross lack of judgment - including getting convicted of impaired driving, causing a separate accident which killed another person, and filing for bankruptcy.

In the Saskatchewan Party’s leadership campaign, Moe managed to stay just below front-runner status which might have caused competitors to focus more on his weaknesses. And since he took power, the NDP has understandably focused on the many problems with what Moe’s government has been doing more while in office, rather than his past personal actions.

To be sure, it’s a noble impulse to presume that people can overcome and learn from their past tragedies. But there comes a point where we need to ask whether somebody is repeating the patterns which caused them to happen.

And in Moe’s case, the answer is alarming.

Moe offered a brief media tour when his fatal car crash was raised during the course of the Saskatchewan Party leadership campaign. And his responses then are telling today.

While Moe acknowledged the collision, he avoided humanizing the victim (phrasing his descriptions along the lines of “there was a fatality”). And he's equally plainly dodged any self-awareness or responsibility - recognizing that the RCMP’s investigation determined that he drove unsafely, but portraying the crash as a mere matter of whether he proceeded “a few moments earlier, a few moments later”, rather than something for which he bore any fault.

Moe’s pattern of barrelling ahead with insufficient regard for the safety of himself or others has followed him into power. And now, it’s set the tone for his government.

It would have been telling enough for Moe to pursue a snap spring election at the best of times. Even leaving aside the lack of ethics involved in manipulating a fixed election date for partisan advantage, Canadian political history is rife with leaders who received a rude awakening after indulging in enough hubris to believe that an unnecessary early election was the road to holding power indefinitely.

Even worse, though, Moe was positively gleeful in taunting the NDP and the province about calling an election at a time when any avoidable person-to-person contact exacerbates the risks of a public health emergency - while his party also mocked the NDP's well-founded efforts to point out how dangerous that would have been.

Having reluctantly ruled out the snap election plan (while again refusing to admit he could possibly have been in the wrong), Moe has continued to demonstrate a glaring lack of attention to dangerous driving conditions, insisting on presenting budget documentation for political consumption long after anybody could possibly think it bore any resemblance to reality. It was only this week that he finally and farcically decided to erase the revenue side of the ledger altogether from a spending plan - which figures to allow his party to advertise its election platform on the public dime.

That’s all consistent with the Saskatchewan Party's political strategy of making loud announcements, spending millions of corporate dollars on slanderous attack ads, and hoping to have people make surface judgments based on a lack of information. (And if Moe had been able to get his way, an election held during a pandemic might well have helped in creating that political environment.)

And the problem goes far beyond Moe himself: as he's set the example, his passengers in cabinet have chosen to egg him on. Gord Wyant has taken to shouting insults at any passer-by brazen enough to suggest that Moe keep his eyes on the road; Don Morgan and Jim Reiter have gone out of their way to moon Meili and the NDP, rather than focusing on some of the most important cabinet roles in a public health crisis.

The end result is that Moe’s reckless joyride is endangering everybody in Saskatchewan. And as a province, we need to ask how many people have to get killed by our premier’s unsafe driving before we finally wrestle the keys away.

New column day

Here, on the "hush memo" issued to Saskatchewan doctors, and the Moe government's eagerness to limit any voice for public servants to an ineffective whistleblower process.

For further reading...
- David Giles previously reported on the Saskatchewan Party's plan for a snitch line to centralize all concerns about the health care system. And Adam Hunter's initial report includes the original SHA memo.
- The Public Interest Disclosure Commissioner's most recent annual report is here (PDF). And the relevant legislation is here (PDF): see in particular the limited scope of "wrongdoing" under section 3 which may be addressed, as well as the Commissioner's discretion not to investigate matters of policy choice in section 16(1)(d).
- Finally, Murray Mandryk has also weighed in.

New column day

Here, on the Libs' pleasantly surprising hints toward enforcing the Canada Health Act - and the Saskatchewan Party's response that it would rather fight for profit-motivated medicine than work on building a sustainable universal system.

For further reading...
- By way of background on the enforcement of the Canada Health Act at the federal level, see here and here as to the Libs' refusal to act which helped to precipitate the fall of the Martin government, and here, here and here as to how matters further deteriorated under the Harper Cons.
- Stefani Langenegger reported on how pay-for-play MRIs in Saskatchewan (along with other similar schemes elsewhere) are at least attracting some scrutiny from Federal Health Minister Jane Philpott.
- And Scott Stelmaschuk points out how the Saskatchewan Party's corporate medicine is predictably endangering sorely-needed funding.

On regressive choices

Yesterday, I offered a quick, off-the-cuff response to the Sask Party's decision to restrict municipalities in applying property taxes to commercial and industrial land. But let's look in a bit more detail at the warped economic theory Jim Reiter is spouting in defence of the move:

"A very, very small minority of municipalities have been using mill rate factors to, in my view, excessively charge commercial and industrial properties," Government Relations Minister Jim Reiter told reporters at the legislature this week.
... 

He noted that in some cases, such as with a pipeline, it would not be possible for a commercial or industrial property owner "to pick up and move" in response to high taxes.

"In rare instances - we prefer not to have to deal with this - but we need to ensure that there's equity out there," he remarked.

In a media release, the minister noted that most commercial and industrial property owners in the province pay higher municipal property taxes than those paid on agricultural and residential properties for delivery of many of the same municipal services.

"Setting this interim limit will be a first step toward fairer taxation among all municipal property tax classes going forward and focuses on the most extreme occurrences," Reiter said in the release.

Now, those of us who see some value in being able to collect taxes might see the fact that property taxes are easily enforced as a feature, not a bug. See for example Josh Barro:

Everybody hates property taxes because they are hard to avoid. But that's a good thing -- it means property taxes are relatively non-distorting. In fact, taxes on land are completely non-distorting: Raising them won't cause any reduction in the amount of land. Taxes on improvements do distort the economy (they discourage the construction of buildings) but not as much as some other taxes. After all, once a house exists, you can't easily move it in response to tax changes.

...

Local government can't be financed solely with property tax, but the choice of many states (especially California) to back away from property tax over the last four decades has been a mistake. Property taxes are an efficient and effective way to finance government, and we should learn to love them. 

But consistent with his party's anti-social philosophy, Reiter is actually making the argument that municipal property taxes should be limited through provincial intervention precisely because they're relatively difficult to avoid. (And never mind that in the case of, say, a pipeline, a property tax is probably the only way of recouping any social benefit whatsoever from land which mostly sits idle, fails to provide any local economic activity and creates a significant risk of environmental damage.)

Let's take Reiter's argument another step toward its logical conclusion though - applying the converse of his argument that barriers to tax avoidance are supposed to be a sign of a bad tax regime. By implication, that would suggest that taxes are to be paid by the suckers who can't shuffle assets across borders and corporate entities to avoid them - and that the Sask Party disapproves of any tax which doesn't allow for easy avoidance on the part of those who can afford it (while favouring only those taxes which can be evaded).

That in turn raises ample reason for concern about Reiter's declaration that the new limit on mill rates is only a "first step". The Sask Party has no qualms about giving more favourable treatment to (selected) businesses than it does to mere citizens. But Reiter is effectively threatening any municipality which applies the mirror image of that principle and looks to the businesses who see ongoing profits from a municipality's development to pay a dime more than the lowest mill rate charged to, say, a senior with a modest home and a fixed income.

In sum, Reiter is telling us that we may be in for some combination of provincially-mandated hikes to residential property taxes, cuts to business property taxes and/or cuts to municipal services, all in the interest of handing even more to the corporate sector at the hands of citizens. And we should be careful not to let the Sask Party drag the province down that road without a fight.

On rejected opportunities

Despite receiving relatively little public attention, a new initiative called Save Our Saskatchewan Crowns has been piling up supporters over the last little while. And now we've received an obvious reminder of why that effort is needed, as the Sask Party's anti-Crown ideology is resulting in its telling the Saskatchewan Transportation Company not to even look at taking up profitable bus routes which may be abandoned by Greyhound:

With Greyhound Canada planning to cut service in Manitoba and northern Ontario and reviewing operations in Saskatchewan and Alberta, the NDP’s Ron Harper sees a chance for the provincially-owned bus company to cash in.

“The real issue here is an opportunity for STC to expand its services to pick up those routes that are abandoned by Greyhound that are very lucrative,” said Harper, mentioning as examples the Winnipeg-to-Edmonton or Winnipeg-to-Calgary routes and not the unprofitable rural routes that are at the root of Greyhound’s plans.

The revenue from such operations between large centres could be enough to potentially eliminate the government’s annual operating subsidy for STC, which hit $7.8 million this year, said Harper.

But Jim Reiter, appointed in May as the Saskatchewan Party government’s minister responsible for STC, slammed the brakes on the idea.

He said the notion was “hypothetical” and that even if Greyhound goes through with its threat to cut services, other private companies may step in to fill the void.
...
The NDP said the government is being blinded by ideology and at the least has a responsibility to examine the potential of STC expansion before dismissing it out of hand.

Now, it would seem obvious to me that anybody who wanted STC to be operated as a viable business would be looking to ask questions along the lines of, what routes is Greyhound abandoning? Who else might take them up? Is STC in the best position to do so? Can STC make a profit for itself by doing so?

Of course, one could reasonably argue that it's worth being fairly risk-averse in reaching the answers. But it would seem to reflect nothing short of wilful blindness to refuse to even ask the questions.

Predictably, though, the Sask Party isn't the least bit interested in any cost-benefit analysis as to how STC can run its business better by taking on out-of-province routes - meaning that both travellers who might benefit from STC's offering a choice and Saskatchewan citizens who would stand to benefit from any STC profits will end up missing out on that opportunity. And while that might be a great result for a private operator who might be able to make more money off the routes than it could if STC was allowed to act as a functioning business, it's hard to see how the Sask Party's ideology is doing anything but placing Saskatchewan's interests last behind those of businesses outside the province.