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Let’s also take a look at deferred maintenance. A lack of spending on our roads by councils in the 1990s is exactly why the city put a dedicated road tax of two per cent in each budget for the past four years. Currently, we are paying extra taxes to catch up and maintain road infrastructure which was not properly funded in the past.

Now, we are at that very same point with transit. Saskatoon has under-invested in its transit system for years and we need to pay more to bring it in line with other growing cities. For example, Saskatoon has the oldest fleet in Canada with an average age of 13 years. The Canadian average is eight years. Before we even start investing in rapid transit, we need to bring our existing fleet up to standard. The estimate is $30 million for buses alone, over the next 10 years, to increase service hours by 126,000.

We are looking at some old issues resurfacing in this election as well. The question is always, ‘What are you going to do about attracting more business and jobs to Saskatoon?’ This has been a civic election issue time after time. It’s not wrong, but perhaps it is time to start focusing on how we are going to attract more people to Saskatoon — people who choose Saskatoon, from a list of good choices in Canada, as a place to move to and stay.

Jobs aren’t enough. Look at our statistics. When the resource economy heats up and resource prices rise, jobs are created, and people move here. But they don’t stay. Saskatoon is now back to negative net outmigration, losing people to other provinces, which, unfortunately, is normal. If it were not for a healthy natural increase (the number of births over deaths annually) and plenty of recent international migration, our growth would be close to zero today.