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“When you look at the number of challenges we’ve had with the falling and tumbling commodity prices, it does have an impact and ripple effect through the economy. Frankly, one of the saving graces is that we got the rain in July, much-needed rain. June was looking pretty bleak on the ag front, yet we had an average crop. That certainly did help.”

BJ: Looking ahead to 2016, are you expecting to see the economy bounce back or just more of the same?

M B-P: “When we are looking at the tightening of the economy, we have been telling and will continue to tell all levels of government — federal, provincial, municipal — don’t make a bad situation worse. And certainly this is the worse time possible to be increasing the cost of doing business. The worst thing any government can do is to introduce tax hikes in their upcoming budgets to make up for revenue shortfalls or fiscal challenges. What that will do is just dampen the optimism and erode that business confidence.”

BJ: What do you want to see from the federal and provincial finance ministers in their upcoming budgets?

MB-P: “We have been pleased that the Saskatchewan finance minister (Kevin Doherty) has said that they’re not going to be hiking taxes… That’s an important message. They’re resisting the temptation of taking the easy way out, by ratcheting up taxes…”

“You can look at our neighbours to the west and east and they’re taking the very easy route out by saying we’re just going to increase the cost of doing business. Whether it’s a CPP (Canada Pension Plan) hike in Manitoba, (the NDP) support that, or if it’s raising corporate taxes (by the NDP government in Alberta) or all those policies that we see in those provinces that are going to add and pile onto the cost of doing business, which is certainly isn’t the approach that we support.”