Eighteen months before the next provincial election, Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall has given his cabinet ministers new task lists.However, most of the items on agriculture minister Bob Bjornerud’s list are already in the works and will be ongoing.For example, improvements have been made to crop insurance and will continue, Bjornerud said.AgriStability is moving to Saskatchewan and legislation has been passed to establish a dairy producers’ marketing board.Bjornerud’s list also includes a request to enable the sale of crown agricultural land “while respecting environmentally sensitive habitat,” a topic that drew much controversy during legislative debate last month.”An awful lot of what we have in our mandate letter is really things that we’ve been already working on,” Bjornerud said. “There’s always a lot of work to be done yet.”The ministry’s aim is to help reduce regulatory burden and make the industry more attractive to young people and new entrants.Bjornerud will work with Enterprise Saskatchewan and industry to “implement a plan to increase competitiveness, production, product development and value-added processing” in the crops sector.He agreed that value-added projects haven’t always been that successful, particularly when government has stepped in to help.”We saw over the past 20 years a number of ventures where taxpayers’ money went into individual businesses and then we see the list of all the writeoffs that have been out there,” he said. “When it comes to taking a position as an equity (partner) in any of these new businesses, it’s not going to happen.”Instead, government can help by providing infrastructure such as roads, water and power.
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