Sask.'s public debt — almost $20B and growing — nearly absent from election campaign spotlight

Health care and education spending. Tax cuts, exemptions and rebates. Saskatchewan political leaders are promising taxpayers they will pay less, but get better public services.

One issue nearly absent from the campaign trail in the lead-up to the Oct. 28 provincial election is the recent trend toward deficit budgets and the province's rapidly-growing debt. The debt has more than tripled in the past decade, to nearly $20 billion from $5.4 billion.

"Over time, that deficit becomes debt and the debt incurs an interest payment. So that, just like a snowball, will keep loading and loading and loading bigger if you don't do anything about it," said Haizen Mou, a professor of government finance at the Johnson-Shoyama School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan.

That $20-billion figure represents general debt accumulating in the operations of government ministries. The government reserve a separate category called specific debt for capital projects and other expenses. That sits at more than $11 billion. That's a $31-billion "snowball" of total debt.

Interest payments on that debt will now top $700 million per year.

Gage Haubrich, Prairie director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said the average family of four is paying more than $2,000 per year in tax on interest payments. Haubrich said that money could have hired roughly 7,000 nurses or police officers across the province.

Haubrich said taxpayers should be outraged.

"One of the most important things the government can do is balance the budget and start to pay down debt, because that means the government will be on the hook for less and less money wasted on debt interest payments," Haubrich said.

"Every single dollar the government adds in debt has to be paid back, plus interest, and that's costing Saskatchewan taxpayers a lot of money this year."

University of Regina political science professor Tom McIntosh said this election campaign is different than those of the past.

"Ten or 15 years ago, so much of our election campaigns were focused on the debt, the running of deficits. Who was the better financial manager? All of that, all of that sort of rhetoric, has left the political agendas," McIntosh said.

McIntosh said most of the provincial debt has been accumulated by the Saskatchewan Party and the Progressive Conservative governments of the '80s.

In 2008, then-Premier Brad Wall said his top priority was debt elimination.

"I'd like Saskatchewan to have a debt clock with exactly one digit — zero," Wall said that year in a government news release.