Selling crowns
In 2012, crown corporations — SaskTel, SaskPower, SaskEnergy, SGI, Sask Gaming and ISC —earned $524.9 million in profits and returned $325.5 million in dividends to government coffers.
From 1987 to 2011, the same group of crowns (minus Sask Gaming) earned $6.771 billion with $4.852 billion going to general revenue.
Under Premier Brad Wall’s proposed legislation, that would allow him to sell up to 49 percent of any crown corporation. It means 49 percent of those dividends would now go into the hands of the private investors. This shortfall would then have to be made up by you and me. Selling off 49 percent of any crown corporation and still calling it a public utility is a lot like saying one is “a little bit pregnant.”
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The crowns have continually added to government coffers to benefit all people in Saskatchewan. Yet, when Wall is asked to come clean on his privatization plans, all he does is deny.
The Saskatchewan Party has continually bungled the provincial budget by cutting taxes for the rich to appease their friends, robbing the crowns of their dividends, thus forcing them to increase their rates to consumers, and now it wants to give away the profit-making crowns to their friends.
By selling off 49 percent of any crown, it means giving away 49 percent of the profits that are yours and mine and belongs to all of us. It is that plain and simple.
Joyce Neufeld
Waldeck, Sask.
Cost of living
It was mid-August. I was having difficulty with a modern techy house appliance. Try as I may, I cannot repair it. Finally at about 8 p.m., I telephone the assistance number in the manual. Within five minutes the gentleman somehow has everything repaired. He states that he has time and would like some conversation.
“What is your occupation?” he asks. I reply that I am a primary food producer. “What is that?” is his return line. My reply is that in simple terms, I am a farmer. His reply is that as a farmer I am doing very well. Little does he know he has opened a real can of worms.
This is my reply: I have been farming for almost 50 years. That long ago minimum wage was $1.25 an hour. Do you know what it is today? In his reply he states yes, it is $10.50 an hour today in Montreal. I now know he is in Montreal.
I then state to him that the minimum wage in those 50 years is now eight times what it was then. Not only that, but wheat was just over $2 per bushel in the early 1970s.
It is now $4 to $5 a bushel. That is double. How about gas prices? In the early ’70s it was 25 cents per gallon. That is less then six cents a litre. What is it today? About $1.10 per litre in Montreal. Bread then was 10 loaves for 99 cents. Today that 99 cents would be lucky to purchase half a loaf.
I had 50 acres of rapeseed. Later that crop year, I sold it for over $8 per bu. I took some, not all, of that cash and walked into a machine agent, putting the funds of $9,500 on the sales desk and driving a new tractor off his lot. That same type of tractor today would cost a minimum of $45,000.
Cost of living: we have never kept up with the remainder of society. Fertilizer was less then $100 per ton in bags then. We now have seen it as high as near $700 per ton bulk now.
This whole scenario clearly tells you why the “unharvested grain throws wrench in cash-advance plan” from The Western Producer’s Oct. 27 front-page article. Keeping up with the cost of living would mean that article would not exist.
Delwyn J.J. Jansen
Humboldt, Sask.
