Sask. United Party leader discusses fall election with Evan Bray

Two Saskatchewan Party MLAs will be running in the election under a new party banner. Greg Brkich and Denis Allchurch will run as Saskatchewan United Party candidates this fall. Jon Hromek, leader of the Saskatchewan United Party, joined Evan on Sept. 18, 2024, to discuss this news.

Listen to the interview here:

Tell me what you feel is lacking and what your party will bring.

HROMEK: To me, what a conservative is, a conservative believes in low taxes. We believe in low taxes. We believe in small government. We believe in responsible spending. We believe in less tape and regulations. We believe in individual responsibility, rather than big government, family values, and a true conservative is very focused on creating an entrepreneurial environment in the province, such that small business – small and medium-sized businesses – can thrive. So what we’re seeing today, we’re not seeing small government. We’re seeing a big government. We’re seeing massive spending. We’re seeing high taxes, and we’re seeing just regulations just coming out over and over and over again, and that is driving down that entrepreneurial spirit in the province.

How do you actually make that happen?

HROMEK: To put it in context, Saskatchewan, right now is spending the most it’s ever spent in its history on programs. And yet we see education, education is on life support, and healthcare is flat out. It’s flatlined, like we need to bring in paddles here with those programs, and yet, in reality, we’re spending the most we’ve ever spent as a province. So, wanting to talk about affordability… we need to address the root issues. The root issues of affordability are size of government and high taxes. So with the size of government being high, what do you get with that? You get regulations. You get more red tape. What does that do? That increases the cost of doing business in the province and basically just increases the cost of doing anything, so that leads to inflation. And with respect to high taxes, well, why do we have high taxes in this province? The reason we have high taxes is because the government spends so much. So that’s why we have to get that spending under control, and that’s why we got to lower taxes. So what do we believe in? What are we pushing? The first thing we’re pushing is to cut the PST in half. You have to cut the PST in half. That will not only help families and individuals, but it’ll also help businesses. And then another thing we’ve got to do is we’ve got to cut the gas tax. So we’ve got to start addressing these, these tax issues, and then we have to start addressing the size of government, because if you don’t start addressing the size of the public service, what’s going to happen is we’re just going to lose all productivity. And that’s like, I’ve heard it on your show many times. There’s a productivity crisis in Canada, and that’s where this comes from.

So when you when you’re talking about cutting the size of government, are you talking about the bureaucrats, or are you talking about the number of seats in the province?

HROMEK: No, I’m talking about bureaucrats. I’m talking about the administration. We’re talking about stopping and auditing departments and looking, not from an internal audit perspective, but a full audit perspective. We know there’s issues in education, there’s issues in health care, but we also know, for example, health care has 20 times the health administration per capita that Germany does. These are the types of things that have to be addressed, because in order to get the spending under control, we have to address the bureaucracy. We’ve got to look for efficient efficiencies there, because in reality, throwing more money at it over and over and over again and expecting a different results, it’s not working. It’s time to bring in some new, new eyes.

So John, you you talk about the cuts you would like to make to taxes. How do you reconcile that with the need to continue to fund the projects? The PST that you’re talking about cutting, I’m guessing there’s a lot of people that would welcome that change, but at the same time have an expectation that service levels aren’t going to go down. How do you do that?

HROMEK: Talking about the provincial gas tax specifically, that’s about $500 million where we would find that money, because we would cut it. We wouldn’t put a moratorium on it, like Carla (Beck is) talking about. We’re saying we’re just scrapping it completely. Where we’re going to find the money for that? We’re going to take it from Scott Moe’s provincial carbon tax plan that he has where the large emitters are paying a carbon levy. This is governed by the Ministry of the Environment. It’s 100 per cent within the provincial purview and provincial jurisdiction to do so, and last year alone it collected $500 million in big funds. So that covers that. With respect to PST, cutting the three per cent of PST, that’s about $1.5 billion. That’s why we’re pushing for a full royalty review framework, review of the potash industry. The potash framework was designed in the ‘90s and the early 2000s, and the price of potash has changed since then. The production of potash has changed in the province since then, and it’s something that needs to be reviewed. It was supposed to be reviewed in 2015 by the by the Brad Wall government, but they decided not to. I think they got some pushback from industry – of course, you’re going to get pushback when you look at this – but in in response to that, they walked away, and about a year, year-and-a-half later, that’s when they decided to increase the PST and to apply it to things that had never been applied to before. So they chose – they chose back in 2015 – to increase PST rather than address the royalty framework shortfall that we’re seeing in the potash.