Every year, Saskatchewan municipalities are required by law to submit their financial statements to the provincial government. The province is supposed to make those statements public, however the Canadian Taxpayers Federation says they’ve been falling short on their duties.

CTF Prairie Director Gage Haubrich says the province stopped posting them in 2008, promised to do something about it in 2019, and in 2024 no progress has been made.

“We see as far as transparency and accountability goes, there are only upsides to posting these online.”

In 2021, the CTF took the matter into its own hands and attempted to contact every municipality in the province with an aim to publish their statements, however just over one third of the documents were able to be retrieved.

“Because it’s so difficult, because some municipalities don’t have websites, some don’t have full time staff if you’re a little RM, we were only actually able to get 35% of the documents.”

He says the governments of Alberta, Ontario, and many Saskatchewan First Nations have implemented east-to-access web portals where these numbers are available, so there should be no reason the province can’t join them.

“It’s all we really need. (You should) be able to go onto the website, type in the RM you live in, type in the small town that you live in, and have that PDF document pop up so you can see how those governments are spending your money. Nothing too complicated, nothing extravagant, just a place taxpayers know they can go to get that information.”

The CTF is calling on the province to publish the statements publicly as soon as possible.