Sask. Party leadership candidate Scott Moe says population growth is No. 1 priority

In the lead-up to the Sask. Party leadership race in the province, CBC Saskatchewan is interviewing each of the six candidates about their priorities and opinions.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall announced his upcoming retirement last August. His party will elect a new leader on Jan. 27, 2018 and the winner will take over the province's top position.

The candidates include Tina Beaudry-Mellor, Gord Wyant, Ken Cheveldayoff, Scott Moe, Alanna Koch and Rob Clarke.

On Facebook, CBC Saskatchewan is giving our followers a chance to pose their own questions, which the candidates will answer live on air on CBC Radio's Blue Sky.

On Tuesday, candidate Scott Moe spoke to CBC News host Jill Morgan following his live appearance.

Jill Morgan: Why do you want to be premier of Saskatchewan?

Scott Moe: Just to leave things a little bit better than we found them. I want to give my children the opportunity to start their career, choose a career, or choose to invest in a business, if possible, in their life in the community they were raised or in another community in this great province.

We haven't always had that opportunity here in Saskatchewan. I didn't have it back in 1991 when I graduated high school, and now I've dated myself.

But I ran for politics in 2011 as an MLA to do my part to improve things or leave things a little better than I found them, and the same reason holds true for my entry into this leadership race.

JM: There is some concern about where things are at in Saskatchewan right now and that we aren't seeing the lucrative times we did in the last several years. So what's your plan to try to make that happen, try to build?

SM: We do have some short-term challenges and they are centred around some natural resource prices that we have — most namely energy and potash products — that have dropped off in the last couple of months and number of years.

That challenges our provincial economy in our communities across the province. It also challenges our provincial budget and we've had to face some very tough decisions in the most recent budget, and out into the next couple of budgets.

But the fact of the matter is, over the last decade, our exports in this province are up 65 per cent, agricultural exports are double from just 10 years ago.

When we increase the value of those exports, we increase those very opportunities I spoke about in our communities across this province. As we increase those careers in those communities, we increase that chance  for people to move here from other areas of Canada, or the world, and that has been reflective of our communities in the past decade to fill those careers. Or, as I said, more importantly, it gives our children the opportunity to choose their career, either in the community where they were raised or any other community here in the province.

It's been fairly positive over the last 10 years in general with that export growth, with our increase in jobs in our communities. We're up about 165,000 which is unprecedented when you compare to decades before. That is the growth that we need to continue into the next decade, into the year 2030.

JM: You say that you want to be on track to balance the budget by 2019. You also want to reinstate the PST exemption on insurance premiums. This can be covered financially, you say, through a five per cent cut to the civil service, which you say can happen through attrition and retirement.

So if that's the case, then why did the government introduce this 3.5 per cent cut that it wants to see in the civil service?  

SM: That's a target that we have in the budget. That's a target that we are making every effort to negotiate towards with respect to the collective bargaining process that is in process with a number of our partner labour organizations in the province of Saskatchewan. We need to continue with that process, negotiating in good faith with respect to achieving that target to achieve the budgetary targets that we have here in the province of Saskatchewan.

The fact of the matter is, we were faced with a significant downturn in our resource royalties here in the province of Saskatchewan and we also have a task as elected officials to have column A and column B balanced over the long term, and to manage the people's funds, but also to provide the services that people expect of their provincial government.

So we made a number of quite challenging decisions in the last budget in our three-year plan to balance. We stand behind our team in this leadership race as we think it is important to get that budget back to balance so that we can continue with the investment that we have enjoyed over the last decade — some of that infrastructure investment in hospitals and schools across this province, but some of it also investment in people in those facilities, offering services to people in communities across the province.

I would mention the doctors — 750 more physicians who are in our communities — either offering services in a community such as where I live, in Shellbrook, or Spiritwood or Rosthern in my constituency, but also such as the educators who are in schools across the province teaching the children, and there's more of them now.

So we need [to] ensure that we have that sustainable investment into the future and the way to do that is to make sure that we're fiscally responsible over the next number of years.

JM: But if you can achieve that savings through a five per cent cut through attrition and retirement, why do you need the 3.5 per cent cut?

SM: The five per cent through attrition and retirement is what we've put forward as part of the way we would backfill the $120 million on reinstating the exemption on PST.

The other part is to forgo the half a per cent corporate income tax reduction that we had planned for this next year. That's our leadership commitment to reinstate the PST exemption on life and health insurance, of which we heard from a number of groups across the province was just a little too close to home — individuals who are personally planning in investing in the case of a personal family disaster, obviously individuals that are involved in providing that service across the province, but we also heard from employers that have group life and group health plans with their employees, shared plans.

We heard loud and clear that that was maybe a challenging decision with some impacts, not only to our economy but to families across the province. We needed to look for some way to find those funds to continue on our three-year plan to balance.

We've also put in our crop and hail insurance in there, as well as we've heard quite loudly that that's a cost of production on our agricultural products that just isn't feasible as we move forward.

So that's where we come up with the five per cent through attrition. We continue to respect the collective bargaining process and work towards the 3.5 per cent we had in the budget. I've talked to people across the province in the private sector that have also experienced either work sharing arrangements or reductions in their income as well. As things start to strengthen a little bit some of that seems to be starting to come back.

I think it's also important to note that on that 3.5 per cent reduction it was led by the elected officials here in the province of Saskatchewan.

JM: What would you say is your No. 1 priority, if elected?

SM: Our No. 1 priority, most notably, is to achieve our 1.5 million population in the province of Saskatchewan by the year 2030. That's a 50 per cent increase in just about 23 years. That's an incredible phrase if you even think back 15 years, that's isn't a phrase you ever would have heard or believed here in the province.

The way that we see to do that is quite simple. We increase the value of our exports, our agricultural exports, by making canola oil, by refining our pulse exports, our energy exports, by adding value to those exports every opportunity we get, either by connecting them to markets through new pipelines, which we'll always advocate and lobby for — or whether it be by adding value to our actual product, our manufactured goods that we export in the province of Saskatchewan. We export these products — this is our source wealth, and we export these products to over 150 countries each and every year.

Agribition was just in town and there's people from all over the world looking at our livestock sector, which is just an example of how global we've become. As we increase that export value, we increase those opportunities for jobs and careers in communities across the province and we increase the opportunity to grow our population in rural, northern and urban communities.

JM: What do you think people in this province need [in order] to do what you're saying — to grow? Are there certain issues that you see as the biggest challenges that are holding us back right now?

SM: There are always challenges as you talk about growth in any economy, in any population, in any community.

As I said, we export to over 150 countries around the world. We need to continually engage with them on what they want to see in the products that they're purchasing. And the fact is that in this day and age, people are concerned with the environmental sustainability or the environmental footprint with which their products are produced.

And we're fortunate here in Saskatchewan when you look at the environmental suite of how we produce our grain crops, how we produce our beef crops, how many of them are grass-fed on pastures that are protected and are fixing carbon every single day — when you look at how our potash mines are and compare the environmental suite of regulations that our potash mines operate compared to others around the world.

The same holds true for our energy sector as you compare our regulations to areas such as Iraq, such as Saudi Arabia — we have very sustainable export products. We need to ensure that we tell that to all of our customers as we move forward in the next decade. They care about it, we have it and the world needs a little more of what Saskatchewan has.

When there is an expansion in one of these sectors it should be expanded in the province of Saskatchewan because of the sustainability that we provide, because of the environmental suite of regulations that we operate within.  

JM: You have a lot of support from MLAs in Saskatchewan. Why is that?      

SM: They're my colleagues that I work with each and every day, and probably the people to ask why they want to be part of our team is them.

We had another one come on this morning with Chris Tell in Regina joining our team, so we are very fortunate. Although it isn't lost on me that it is my name on the ballot and it is my name that is entered to be the leader of the Saskatchewan Party, and ultimately the premier of the province of Saskatchewan, but I would never be at the microphone without the support of all of those colleagues that I have.

We're very much a team in when it comes to our policy direction and our vision into the future for growing the economy and also on the human services side, in making sure that we're able to provide the services that the people of the province expect their provincial government to provide.

We have a great team. It's one that I'm very proud of and I'm absolutely honoured to be involved in.

JM: Are there places where you feel the government has fallen down in services for the people of the province? There is unrest and there is concern in a number of areas. Is there something in that group that you realize maybe needs more attention?

SM: There always is when we have growing communities such as we have. And it is the government's job to communicate with the people and to fill those needs as they arise.

Twenty or 21 new schools being built this year, many of them the nine joint-use facilities, were built specifically to address the growth in the province of Saskatchewan. I visited communities like  Martensville and Warman in the lead-up to the announcement of those facilities — and other schools that were bursting at the seams, quite honestly — as well as some of our schools in Saskatoon and Regina.

So the government has stepped up and made the investment required in those facilities. And that's just one example of as we grow, there is always going to be pressures and we need to continue to address those as we go along.

I think back to a pressure we had in the constituency [in which] I live in a number of communities — and it's ongoing — and that's access to health-care professionals. We had a tremendous challenge in terms of accessing physicians in a number of communities.

There have been changes made in the regulatory environment and how we acquire physicians from other areas of the world. There have been changes to the number of physicians that we train at the University of Saskatchewan, at the College of Medicine, which will ultimately be our long-term solution to that stable supply.

Some of the physicians who have moved here are waiting to move into a facility such as the Children's Hospital to provide those specialist services that benefit all of those families across the province when they're required.

So those are a couple of examples of how the government has stepped up in years past. As we look forward, there are other challenges that we have and we need to continue to address them, and that's somewhat irrespective of this leadership race. That's the expectation of the government of Saskatchewan.