Affordability seldom strictly means helping people who can least afford things. It’s more about helping those who help you with their votes.
One of the more bizarre elements of the 2024 provincial election was Carla Beck’s New Democrats campaigning like conservatives and Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party campaigning like New Democrats … at least, when it came to taxes and affordability.
This week, we saw the culmination of this strange role reversal in the introduction of the Sask. Party’s centrepiece legislation — the Affordability Act.
To better understand, one first has to get past the now decades-old Sask. Party rhetoric about how this policy — and, frankly, every policy — is simply about ensuring “the province remains the most affordable place to live, work, raise a family and start a business in Canada.”
Unfortunately, affordability seldom strictly means helping people who can least afford things. It’s more about helping those who help you with their votes.
The NDP’s own affordability bundle focussed on eye-catching policies like lifting the gas tax for six months — a policy that would more benefit those who can afford or prefer carbon-tax guzzling vehicles — and the Saskatchewan NDP do not support that carbon tax.
But does this policy best reflect the traditional NDP philosophy? Well, perhaps not.
This takes us to the suite of election promises of affordability measures from the Sask. Party, introduced in legislative form on Monday.
Highlighting the 13 affordability commitments is what Deputy Premier and Finance Minister Jim Reiter called the “the largest personal income tax reduction in the province since 2008,” in which the Sask. Party has vowed to raise personal exemptions, spousal exemptions, child exemptions and the seniors’ supplements by $500 a year for the next four years.
Also, the province’s income tax brackets and basic tax credits will be indexed to offset the impacts of inflation.
Beck rightly noted in Monday’s question period that focussing on income tax measures means people won’t get a break until 2026, and “people need relief now.”
It is true that there’s little in Reiter’s package (beyond not collecting the carbon tax on home heating) that will help anyone immediately. But it’s similarly important to note that the NDP’s proposal for gas tax elimination is a “temporary” six-month lift.
Similar to the bizarre federal government decision to lift the GST for two months, such temporary lifts mostly just create a bureaucratic nightmare for stores that would have to recalibrate gas pumps and registers.
More critical, however, is who — proportionally speaking — is helped the most.
Cutting consumption taxes generally helps people with the economic wherewithal to consume — which is why they are generally more preferred by right-of-centre parties than left-of-centre parties.
But reducing income tax from the bottom up means, as Reiter noted, more than 54,000 working poor people will no longer be paying provincial income tax.
Add in the 50 per cent increase in the Saskatchewan First-Time Homebuyers Credit maximum benefit, and the Home Renovation Tax Credit allowing homeowners to save $420 per year on home renovations, or $525 per year for seniors.
Finally, the Affordability Act package does specifically help some of the most disadvantaged with changes to both the Caregiver Tax Credit and the Disability Tax Credit that will increase the respective supplement for children by 25 per cent (plus indexation), which will support families caring for adult children or parents with physical or mental disabilities.
Certainly, NDP criticisms that the Sask. Party is not doing enough for the homeless or social assistance rates remain valid.
But governance is about choices. And many would argue that helping caregivers, seniors, disabled people and the working poor is more crucial than helping others with a gas tax decrease that ends next spring.
Some of those making that argument might be traditional New Democrats.
Mandryk is the political columnist for the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
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