Being small-c conservative means having cake, eating it
Regina Leader-Post columnist Murray Mandryk today pokes delicious fun at Sask Party backbenchers intent on keeping the province’s public servants in fiscal check. The comedy stems from provincial auditor Fred Wendel’s appearance this week before the public accounts committee, where the Saskers gave him something of a talking to. Never mind that, as Mandryk points out, last year’s Sask Party budget was “a mere $9.623 billion–only $1.2 billion or 15.2 per cent more than proposed in the NDP government’s final budget. By comparison, former NDP premier Roy Romanow’s first budget in 1992 actually decreased spending by 5.3 per cent from the final budget of the Progressive Conservatives he replaced.” Mandryk is most cutting when he quotes from Blazing Saddles (1974): “Much like my friends on the public accounts committee,” he writes, “I, too, have lived by the credo of Mel Brooks’s character, Gov. William J. Le Petomane: ‘We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs.'”