WEYBURN: It is disheartening when a provincial government you thought was helping us, the citizens of Saskatchewan, in our daily lives to then turn around to inflict an unreasonable expense on us when we can least afford it.
I want to cry “Foul!”, and if I were a referee in this football game, I’d be tossing a yellow flag to let everyone know a penalty has been incurred.
What I am referring to is the double-whammy of our Crown utilities, SaskEnergy and SaskPower, both proposing large rate hikes.
The worst one is SaskEnergy, which wants to put in a huge increase of 16.8 per cent within a few weeks, to take effect on August 1st, with yet more increases next year and the year after that.
SaskPower is only slightly less offensive, as they are putting in a four-per-cent increase this year and another four per cent next year.
In case our government hasn’t noticed, we have highway-robbery level of gas prices, and increasing food prices – in short, everything’s going up and it’s making life really hard for a lot of people.
You can’t very well just say, “Oh well, we have to hike our prices too” and impose huge increases in costs with little to no warning. This hike of nearly 17 per cent by the first of August? Really?
I’m old enough to remember the disaster of high inflation in the 1970s and 80s, and if you’re also old enough, you will recall that didn’t go so well for many people and many businesses.
What I’m concerned about are people on fixed incomes who can’t handle these increased costs, and the government is no help at all as they are simply adding on to those increased prices.
For those who do not see any matching increase in wages, that actually means they are being paid less as prices go up, and pretty soon there are going to be necessities going by the wayside because there simply is not the money to pay for it all.
There is a saying, there is only one taxpayer. While we’re not the bosses, the buck stops here, literally, as we all have municipal, provincial and federal taxes to pay.
To have the provincially-owned utilities piling on is making the weight of all of this unbearable.
I don’t think the solution in this Catch-22 scenario is to just keep the spiral going up and up and up – there has to be a breaking point.
