Debating reality - data supporting the 2024 Sask General election
Let's connect election topics in Saskatchewan to reality using open data
In a relationship, conflict can arise when parties don’t agree on reality and at least one are unmoved to consider another perspective. After watching the Saskatchewan Provincial Election Leaders Debate, I was struck by how how much the individuals involved disagreed on what is true and an accurate reflection of reality. This is to be expected with politicians in some things. For example, I don’t expect politicians to agree on topics such as:
What is the optimal level of taxation?
How should the government best spend money?
What is the role of government?
These things are all subjective and many authors from Plato to Milton Friedman have all debated these questions well. The realization I had watching the provincial leaders talk was how much they disagreed on things that are not subjective and many that we have reliable data on. This post is not intended to weigh in on an election or sway readers in their decisions leading up to the final day of election week in SK, which is Oct 28, 2024. Rather, this post presents the reader with a collection of sources of information that they can use to investigate matters of fact that politicians might be discussing or even running on. Here are the topics that I’ll cover today below:
Elections and voting
Healthcare
Education
Finance & the economy
Population growth
Elections and voting
I suppose this first section is less contentious in an election, however, I feel it’s necessary to highlight where one might find information on the state of Saskatchewan’s democracy in general.
Elections Saskatchewan is the provincial organization that is responsible, in its own words to “plan, organize, deliver and regulate provincial electoral events for the people of Saskatchewan”. Here is some useful information and data available from Elections Saskatchewan.
Election Results - outcomes, including tally or votes for candidates stretching back to 1982.
Historical GE participation - the share of eligible voters who have cast their vote. Almost 53% of eligible Saskatchewan voters participated in the last provincial election, which was in 2020.
Maps - Who doesn’t love a good map? Not only are these fun to look at and help one find out who the provincial candidates or elected representatives are for their constituency, these areas themselves change over time and these changes can be used for gerrymandering, the practices of adjusting the electoral district boundaries in order to influence an election’s outcome.
These items are important, but less contentious than the topic of political donations, which Election Saskatchewan is also responsible for collecting data on. They even offer a very useful contribution search tool. My thought on reviewing the political donations was at how small most of the contributions are. If these donations, even those from people from larger organizations, are swaying politicians, it’s impressive how cost-effective this strategy must be. In Saskatchewan, the largest donations by individuals or corporations are in the range of $50,000 with values in the range of $20,000 - $30,000 being much more common.
Health
Many Canadians, especially those of the aging Boomer generation find the topic of healthcare to be an important on. As provinces are responsible for delivering health care for Canadians, this area is typically the single largest spending area for a province. In Saskatchewan, this is in the range of 40% of the total government spending in a given year (PDF).
That said, I find it surprisingly difficult to find good quality and accessible information on health care. I know that high quality information exists, however, unlike an organization like Elections Saskatchewan, accountability for collecting and disseminating information on health care in Canada is spread across a number of organizations and agencies. Here is a list of places to get started looking for information on health care in Saskatchewan, in particular, health outcomes.
Saskatchewan health & wellness dashboard - this dashboard was an absolutely invaluable resource during the COVID-19 pandemic and, at the time, I thought that it marked an impressive leap forward for open health system and public health information in the province. The resource has since been decommissioned and my dreams have gone unrealized. That said, the now empty dashboard still exists and perhaps one day it will be populated with health information once more.
Surgical wait times - Surgical wait times have become an outsized topic of interest in the province for nearly two decades now. I could see this being used as an indicator of patient satisfaction or system efficiency, however, this is just one angle and I suspect there are better options. This leads me to the next information source;
Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) - This federal organization provides CIHI (Spending, wait times, patient experience, and more). With full transparency, I haven’t spent a huge amount of time looking at data from this source myself but I know from Epidemiologist friends of mine that this is a major source of high quality health data in Canada. Two links that I think would be valuable to peruse for those interested in health care would be the pages on Indicators and Topics.
Education
Another topic area that appears to get a lot of attention around election times is education, and like health care, this topic area also represents a very large share of provincial spending. Also like health care, it’s quite difficult to find quality and objective information on education. Here are some of the items I’ve looked at:
Saskatchewan Education & Learning Dashboard - a section of the Saskatchewan Dashboard that appears to be kept up-to-date. There is some useful info here, however, as it highlights items like total secondary enrolment for 2022-23 at 54,570 and without context readers like myself would have no clue if this is good, bad, or ugly.
Saskatchewan Teacher’s Federation (STF) - Now, I’m skeptical about linking to a union for information because like any interest group, could be prone to having a self-interest. That said, the organization has some reports that link to good information from Statistics Canada such as expenditures, students in programs, literacy & numeracy, graduation, enrolled students, and share of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Finances and the economy
Tell me about the skeletons in the closet at any organization, and I’ll tell you about what motivates that organization’s decision making. For Saskatchewan, one of our biggest is that the province flirted with bankruptcy in the 1990s and the level of province debt has loomed over us ever since. I wrote about this in the first instalment of my Moe Money, More Problems series as Saskatchewan’s growing debt is a constant source of discussion and disagreement. The best way to learn more about Saskatchewan’s debt, other than continuing to read this newsletter, is to look at the data from Statistics Canada.
Another item of factual contention surrounding the provincial election is related to the provincial debt, but focuses on how current financial management is either growing or shrinking this debt. I’m talking about the provincial budget and more specifically about whether or not budgets are balanced. The best source of information on this is Saskatchewan’s provincial budget documents, which go back to the 1999-2000 fiscal year. I must warn that this information is very dense and, while I doubt this is necessarily true, it seems at times that the information is presented in a way that purposely makes it difficult to answer the question of whether or not the provincial finances are healthy or not.
Population growth
The last topic area to cover today is another of Saskatchewan’s skeletons in the closet. While the population of Canada grew at a steady rate, the population of the province stagnated for decades under high levels of emigration (ie. people moving out of the province). The story that is told in Saskatchewan is that young people didn’t believe in an economic future in the province and were forced to leave for greener fields. I believe that the story is a bit more complex than that, but that’s a deep topic for another day.
According to population data collected by Statistics Canada, in the most recent year available (2023-24), about 20,000 people moved out of Saskatchewan destined for other provinces within Canada (Source). In the same period, about 15,000 people from other provinces within Canada made Saskatchewan their home for a net loss in population of about 5,000 people - this value has remained relatively consistent over the last several decades with only brief periods with positive net inter-provincial population change. On the international migration front, Canada is not much different from other provinces as we observe a fairly small number of people leaving the province for another country each year, and increasingly large numbers of international immigrants arriving in the province (Source).
Bottom line
I hope the reader finds these links to data concerning the ongoing Saskatchewan election informative. In fact, if you do, I’d ask that you share this post with anyone else you think would benefit. Somewhat surprising to me, there are a few topics that are really difficult to get accurate information on (like whether the provincial budget is balanced or not and why), but there are many that we do have good data on. It can be worthwhile to review this data periodically as informed citizens and, in fact, it’s one of the underlying purposes I have for continuing to write this newsletter.