REGINA—A budget which cries poverty and removes funding from vital areas is a harbinger for privatization, according to the Canadian Union of Public Employees – Saskatchewan (CUPE Saskatchewan).

"The bottom line here is that the current government has taken our province from prospering to broke in record time," said Tom Graham, president of CUPE Saskatchewan in responding to the provincial budget delivered at the Legislature today. "The Saskatchewan Party is going to leave a legacy of massive debt, and in the meantime they expect the people of Saskatchewan to tighten our belts to make up for their financial mismanagement over the last two years."

Graham is particularly concerned that a lack of funds can often be a warning sign of privatization to come.

"We’ve seen this before," said Graham. "A government gains popularity through a spend-heavy first budget, then when the money runs out—a forseeable problem, in this case—they throw their hands up and claim they have no choice but to start selling off public holdings and contracting out public services."

Graham said images of Grant Devine’s pennies-on-the-dollar auctions of highway equipment should be fresh in the minds of taxpayers as they read the 2010 budget, revealed in the Legislature today.

"It’s certainly already started," he added. "Two privatized power deals with Northland power, selling off parts of SaskTel piece-by-piece and getting rid of as many as 1,800 public sector jobs only to have unemployment rise, services disappear or contracting out at a high price for services."

CUPE has been a leader in showing how privatization and contracting out—including the expensive Public-Private Partnership (P3) or Alternate Finance Partnership form of privatization—will cost more and leave taxpayers with a weakened economy and severely impaired avenues for economic recovery.

The sale of institutions which voters might find the privatization of most offensive—like schools and hospitals—will be left for last on the privatization agenda, if other jurisdictions are an indicator. But the short-changing of services residents would call "not-for-sale" far from promises that all vital services will continue to be publicly delivered. Wait lists and recruitment and retention issues in the health care sector will suffer for the meager allowance in the new budget, according to CUPE.

"Regardless of how much money we have to spend, doing it publicly is cheaper, more efficient and keeps the cost of living low for all of us," said Graham. "We’ve been asking the Government of Saskatchewan for a commitment to refuse all forms of privatization since their election in 2007, and they continue to refuse to do that while privatizing pieces of our public property behind closed doors.

"This is not in anyone’s best interests, and not an acceptable way to run a province from the standpoint of our members."

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CUPE is the largest union in Saskatchewan, representing 29,000 workers in the health care, university, education, municipal, community-based organization and other sectors of the public service. CUPE is also the largest union in Canada, representing more than 600,000 public employees.For more information, please contact:
CUPE Saskatchewan: (306) 757-1009