Premier Wall talks fire, budget and federal election in latest visit to P.A.

Wall has encouraged all the organizations he has visited to prepare reports that would be taken into consideration during the government’s review of the fire response and policies. The PAGC gave both a written brief and a presentation to Wall.

“[We] saw some common threads and whenever that happens, whenever you’re starting to hear the same thing from different parts of the province from different groups, I think that it’s important for us to listen to that and see if we can make some improvement,” Wall said.

The wildfire management policy has been a hot topic that Wall has heard from a number of groups.

Under the provincial environment ministry’s wildfire practices, a fire within a 20 km radius that poses a threat to a community will be put out. Anything outside of the 20 km radius will only be put out depending on an assessment.

“We do need to look carefully at the wildfire management policy itself in terms of when a fire is actionable … we are going to review that,” Wall said. “I think our wildfire brand did a good job at making sure that there was a lot of commonsense brought to bear on that policy and there was a lot of action taken outside of those perimeters when they thought that was necessary.”

Budget under fire

The forest fires will top $100-million over what was budgeted for firefighting this year, but Wall says that won’t necessarily be reflected in next year’s budget.

“I’m not sure if it’s wise to budget. This year was an unprecedented event. What I think you do is deal with it – you fight the fires, you take care of folks, and we’ll find the money later,” Wall said, adding that firefighting has actually been over budgeted in the last six years prior.

“2006 was the last bad forest firefighting season. We’ve had almost a decade of pretty mild and moderate seasons,” he said.

Another challenge to the budget is the sinking oil prices which have dropped to under $40 US a barrel for the first time since 2009.

“We had already pegged it in the high 50s in the budget. We’re going to have to obviously readjust that downwards for the rest of the year,” Wall said.

“We’re going to do as we’ve done every other year and when we’ve had challenges – we’re going to work hard to make sure that we have a balanced budget.”

Comments on federal election

When it comes to the federal election, Wall said he is not endorsing any particular party, but does have opinions on issues that could affect Saskatchewan.

In particular, the New Democratic Party’s (NDP) proposal to temporarily prohibit crop sciences doesn’t sit well with the premier.

“We’re going to have to highlight that and say that would be terrible for the province of Saskatchewan. It would be bad for agriculture and it would be bad for the economy.”

The province has sent letters to the leaders of the three major parties asking them to outline important issues to the province’s economy.

“Pipelines and equalization and other issues, we’re going to just be open to what all the party’s have to say and we’ll make it public and people can make their own decisions.”

knguyen@jpbg.ca

Follow on Twitter: @khangvnguyen

by Khang Nguyen

Premier Wall talks fire, budget and federal election in latest visit to P.A.

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