The costs of cutbacks

It figures that the Leader-Post can't publish a column on the Sask Party's plan to cut 16% of Saskatchewan's public service positions without including repeated declarations that everybody loves hacking away at the civil service. But at the very least, it's pointed out a couple of rather important considerations which the Wall government is ignoring in its attacks on the size of Saskatchewan's public sector.

Yesterday, the editorial board tossed in as an afterthought the rather important point that cutting public services doesn't make a lot of sense in what's supposed to be a growing population - which means that under Wall, a significantly smaller public sector will have to do significantly more work:

(Reducing the size of government) won't be as easy as some think, particularly in a growing province with rising demand for public services.

And today, Murray Mandryk points out that the Sask Party's choice to cut jobs through attrition rather than through any review of what programs are actually needed is obviously a flawed way of reducing expenses:

(Is) it necessarily responsible to use attrition to cut the civil service? Will the government reduce political hiring as well? What about those areas of government that legitimately might need more staffing?

And, most critically, shouldn't a government be eliminating unnecessary programs rather than reducing the staffing complements in necessary ones?

Mind you, Mandryk stops somewhat short of the ultimate conclusion to be drawn from the Sask Party's attrition strategy. While targeted cuts are naturally seen as a more direct attack on the workers who currently hold the positions, a government-wide attrition strategy actually hints at far more contempt for the work of the public sector: in effect, Wall is telling Saskatchewan that as far as he's concerned, there isn't a single public-sector worker in the province (or combination thereof) who can't be replaced with an empty chair without the public noticing.

Of course, it generally takes some time for the real costs of attacking the public service to become apparent - so one might think Wall could get away with it long enough to cling to power in 2011. But the fact that the Sask Party is bound and determined to impose cuts for years into the future (even as it supposedly projects growth in the province's economy and population) signals that we can expect the worst if Wall is left in charge long enough to carry out his plans. And that should provide the province's citizens with every incentive to stop him before he gets the chance.

Edit: fixed wording.