NDP Leader Carla Beck said her party will make a “generational” investment in education if it forms government.
Saskatoon StarPhoenix
With just under two months until voters are expected to elect a new provincial government, the Saskatchewan NDP continued its rollout of key election policies on Tuesday in Saskatoon.
Standing across from the bustling backdrop of a Saskatoon elementary school as kids and parents navigated pickup and drop-off over the lunch hour, NDP Leader Carla Beck pledged that should it form government, the NDP would invest an additional $2 billion in education over the course if its first four-year term.
“And we can do it without raising your taxes,” Beck added, referencing a campaign pledge made last week committing her party to no personal or corporate tax increases during its first term.
She repeated Tuesday that the NDP plans to finance its campaign pledges by cutting wasteful spending undertaken by the Saskatchewan Party government.
Beck said a “generational investment” is needed to reverse what she characterized as “total and complete mismanagement” of education by the current government over the last decade, while noting Saskatchewan has in that time slid from first to last among provinces in per-student funding for education.
She went on to criticize the Sask. Party’s handling of a long-running labour dispute with teachers, which is now headed for binding arbitration after the last school year saw months of job action amid stalled contract talks.
Beck said her party “wouldn’t have broken the system in the first place” to end up in such a bitter contract negotiation, in which teachers demanded that limits on class size and complexity be written into their contract, due to a lack of trust in the current government’s commitment to follow through on funding pledges.
Beck pointed to her own experience as a Regina public school board trustee prior to being elected as an MLA, while promising that an NDP government would negotiate with “respect for teachers,” and criticizing the current government for spending tax dollars on taking out a series of billboards attacking educators in the midst of the contract dispute.
A $2 billion funding boost over four years works out to an average of an extra $500 million per year; this would roughly double the $247.8 million increase for education provided for 2024 in the Saskatchewan Party’s most recent provincial budget, in which the Ministry of Education received a total of $3.3 billion.
While she promised to reverse the Sask. Party’s record on education investment Beck said the NDP is not contemplating a reversal of the current governing party’s 2009 decision to remove the authority from local school boards to set education property tax mill rates.
Beck did suggest the NDP would be open to discussions on a replacement for the Northern Teacher Education Program (NORTEP), which was eliminated in 2016 after operating for some 40 years to train teachers to work in the province’s northern communities.
Noting the program was “incredibly successful” prior to being cut, Beck said any potential replacement of NORTEP would have to come out of consultation with northern communities and experts in First Nations and Métis education.
