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I am just laughing. I visited the web site of Ensign and I saw my article "Saskatchewan Economic Priorities: Education, then Lower Taxes, and not more Phoney Research" and the accompanying artistic image by Timothy Shire. I am pictured in this image and my first thought was that I appeared as a preacher and therefore I felt that possibly my article was too naive or not clear at all. Anyhow, I am Italian and only after few e-mail exchanges with Tim I realized how far away I was from understanding my own picture in his image. In this image I am pictured as an Irish Leprechaun. Tim explained to me that:

Well, now that I have been reflecting a little on the above mentioned article I must say that I could have sounded really a bit naive in preaching the priority of education above any other economic means to leverage our growth. We must realize that economic decisions become relevant only after we do our own work first, that is we must clean up our own house first, and we have not done so for many years. This brings me to think about the weakness of getting relevant and critical information from the statistical ranking of economic phenomena.

The fact that the United Nations ranked Canada first as the best place to live in the world, and that the World Health Organization ranked Canada 30th as health care must be understood in terms of the way these rankings were computed, and what is strange is that the public never gets to know such important subtleties. Now, can we really say, here in Saskatchewan, that we need more money in education? In a genuine way it is very apparent that we need a very strong emphasis in education, but what does it mean? Does it mean to spend more money in education without any further change? Absolutely not. What we need to do is to stop serving ourselves when in power. It doesn't make sense to spend more money into education when we misspend our resources.

Last year, the Saskatoon Public School Board set the renovation cost for the Brunskill School at $4.5 million and now this cost appears to have ballooned to $7.75 million(1). And the public school board doesn't want to divulge this information to the public. How can we rationalize this state of affairs when a new similar school has cost $8 million? The public board is supposed to be the servant of the public, yet they go on in doing their own business in secrecy and against the interest of the public and of the students. And this is not an isolated incident of mismanagement in education.

I can recall that this same board was embroiled with the saga of the multimillion dollar education centre in Saskatoon(2), and what is worse, the Department of Education has no clue of the philosophical understanding of education(3).

It is a nightmare, we cannot make economic decisions anymore since we don't have the conceptual framework of education, not to say that we lack the responsibility to look after our own children. And this state of affairs is symptomatic in any governmental sector, especially health care!

Yesterday, I came across the news that the health budgets should not be secrets(4); well what is new, we stated a long time ago that this was not only a matter of courtesy for the public to know, but it was matter of the government and of the districts breaking the law(5)! Our government misspends money, mismanages resources, breaks the law. How can we have an expectation that this government can make further economic decisions? The first economic priority is for ourselves to look in the mirror, and it is not education and it is not less taxes either

Endnotes

1. Brunskilling me softly with their song, Straight Talk by Randy Burton, The StarPhoenix, week of July 4, 2000, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

2. An Education inquiry sought: a Bravo for Mr. Ted Merriman! By Mario deSantis, May 19, 1999

3. Systems Dynamics in Education: Failures of the Current System, by Mario deSantis, March 20, 1999

4. Health budgets should not be secrets: commissioner CBC Saskatchewan http://sask.cbc.ca/ Web Posted | Jul 10 2000 6:59 PM EDT EDT

5. District Health Plans: Breaking the Law Again and Again, by Mario deSantis, May 10, 2000