NORTH BATTLEFORD - From affordability to education and healthcare, Battlefords MLA and Saskatchewan Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill shared his thoughts on some highlights from the past year and the province's plans for the year ahead in a recent interview with SaskToday.
"Obviously, last year being an election year, the highlight was again earning the trust of the people of the Battlefords to continue serving as their MLA," he said. "Certainly, at the end of October I was pleased with the results locally. The last four years has been a real pleasure to serve our community in this way, so I'm looking forward to continuing that.
Cockrill previously served as the Minister of Education before becoming the Minister of Health.
"Certainly, In the education file, there have been lots of things I've been working on there. It was exciting to be a part of the Specialized Support Classrooms pilot [program], bringing that forward. I was really pleased [to see] that two of the initial eight schools were in the Battlefords - St. Mary's and McKitrick," he said. "Obviously, we just announced in the fall session that we're going to be expanding that program to 200 schools around the province. So, based on the success that we're seeing early on in that program, we'll see an expansion to that."
The program focuses on helping students in complex classrooms.
"This is a program that was intended to understand that there are students in our classrooms who may need additional support," Cockrill said. "What the program is designed to do is to provide them with another space inside school where they can get some intensive support and specialized support, to help give them the support they need and work with them to re-integrate them back into the main classroom. We're seeing some really good initial success with this program. It was exciting to be a part of developing that, and then implementing it, and now we're expanding it."
For the teachers' contract negotiations, Cockrill notes it was a challenging year in 2024.
"Obviously, for bargaining processes, they are often challenging, and this round was no exception," he said. "I think at the end of the day both the Saskatchewan Teachers' Federation [STF] and the Government of Saskatchewan want to improve educational outcomes for students. That's been a focus. We had arbitration here in December, so now both the STF and the government are waiting for the arbitrator's ruling on that. It's expected sometime this spring."
Looking ahead at 2025, Cockrill has many plans in place. As the Health Minister, Cockrill's focus will be two-fold.
"There will be a couple of focuses - in health care right now it's really expanding Primary Care Services around the province," he said. "We want to make sure that everybody in Saskatchewan over the next number of years gets access to a primary care provider, ensuring that when they need to go and see whether that be a physician [or a] nurse practitioner, that there is somebody in their community or close to their community that they can go see for questioners and concerns they have about their personal health care journey."
Another large priority, Cockrill said, is looking at increasing surgical outputs in Saskatchewan.
"This year we're going to be close to 100,000 surgeries performed in Saskatchewan," he said. "This will be the highest total ever we've performed in a year of surgeries in the province. We know that there's still more work to do in terms of ensuring that people have a reasonable wait for the surgery they need. So, we have more work to do there in terms of making sure that we are attracting the right specialists and the right surgeons to our province, and that we're utilizing our regional centres like the Battlefords Union Hospital as best as possible, so that we can make sure that when people do require surgery that it's a reasonable wait time."
Cockrill also noted that the province is working to make the cost of living more affordable for Saskatchewan residents.
"A conversation that I've had with many constituents both in our community and also around the province has really been concerns around the cost of living," he said. "Our government made pretty significant steps over the last year to really address affordability concerns, and to try to ease that pressure of the cost of living. We did pass legislation in the fall to continue the fact that we are not collecting the Liberal-NDP carbon tax on residential home heating.
"The other piece, as well is around adjusting the provincial income tax brackets which will allow people to keep more of their income before paying provincial income tax," Cockrill added. "We increased the tax-free threshold for a family of four in Saskatchewan to $63,200. That's the highest tax-free threshold in any province in Canada. It's understanding that there are challenges out there around the cost of living, and we're doing our best as the provincial government to ease that pressure for families.
The Saskatchewan Affordability Act changes went into effect Jan. 1, 2025.
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