FSIN Interim Chief Morley Watson is disappointed with the provincial budget.
Watson says it didn’t do anything to address First Nations issues.
For example, he says there is nothing to address high rates of unemployment on reserves.
And he didn’t see anything to deal with the educational funding gap between First Nations and non-First Nations children.
Meanwhile, conservation officer branches in Pelican Narrows and Cumberland House have been eliminated in yesterday’s budget.
Cumberland MLA Doyle Vermette says the officers for Pelican Narrows will now work out of Creighton, while those for Cumberland House will now travel from Nipawin.
Vermette says that will be much more inconvenient for fishers, trappers and hunters.
He also questions how much money will be saved, because conservation officers will now have to travel further to do their work.
New North Chair Bobby Woods — who ran for the Saskatchewan Party in the last election — is not happy with the reduction of conservation officers in the north.
The mayor of Buffalo Narrows also doesn’t like the government’s plan to reduce forest firefighting crews to four-person units from five-person teams.
Woods says the government is relying on planes to fight fires, but that won’t be enough:
“We have a high rate of fires that go on in northern Saskatchewan — and instead they’re putting them into all these aircraft and everything else which, you know, don’t really put the fires out completely. We depend on people to go there and do the ground work, and we need more people.”
Athabasca MLA Buckley Belanger says the north is paying for not supporting the Saskatchewan Party in the last election.
Belanger says the provincial budget contains all kinds of other cuts that will hurt northerners, including the end of the fish freight subsidy, and a cut to the province’s Metis development fund that will reduce the available funds to less than half of what was budgeted last year.
He says, basically, the government is ignoring those who didn’t vote for them:
“Look at all the cuts and the job losses throughout the region — and one can see very easily that they don’t care for people that aren’t important for them . . . and this is what the budget certainly shows.”
Belanger says elders have told him they have seen this sort of thing happen in the past.
La Ronge Mayor Thomas Sierzycki says he is disappointed that funding for Enterprise Regions is ending:
“It’s just unfortunate that they were introduced under this government, money was put into it, and then it’s realized that it’s not working, and then money is taken out. So really, you’re losing by starting them, and then you’re losing by them no longer carrying on and people are obviously not employed anymore.”
However, Sierzycki says he is pleased with an increase in revenue sharing for municipalities.
He says he was also glad to see the $150 tax credit for families with youth involved in healthy, physical activities.