Let's get right to the point: Saskatchewan has the highest education taxes on property in Canada, and it is doing serious harm to our province.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) has renewed its fight for lower property and school taxes and has just released numbers acquired through Freedom of Information that reveals the burden of education taxes on property in Saskatchewan is heavier than any province in Canada.

According to figures obtained from the provincial Department of Education, property taxes funded 59% of the cost of education in Saskatchewan last year. The next heaviest burden was in Manitoba, where 51% of education costs are paid for by property taxes, followed by Ontario 43.5%, Alberta 37.5%, British Columbia 30.1%, Quebec 21.3% and Nova Scotia 16.7%. In three provinces - New Brunswick, Newfoundland, and PEI - education is entirely funded by the provincial government through other revenues.

Clearly, property and school taxes in Saskatchewan are punitive and out of whack with the rest of the country. The enormity of the gap between our province and the rest of the nation is just astounding. At a whopping 59%, the percentage of education funding derived from property taxes in Saskatchewan is more than double the average of 26% for all Canadian provinces.

The provincial government's policies on property taxes and school funding have created this mess. In order to balance its own books and give us a bit of income tax relief, the province has offloaded a larger and larger share of the cost of education onto local governments and the tax burden onto local taxpayers. School boards and municipalities have been forced to raise local property taxes to make up for provincial cuts and to meet the demands of provincial mandated cost increases, like higher salaries for teachers. It's been the provincial government version of 'spread the pain, but duck the blame'.

Skyrocketing school and property taxes have hurt taxpayers everywhere in the province. But nowhere has the pain been more acute than in rural areas over the past few years as farm incomes have plummeted.

Due to the lack of response from the government, thousands of people attended "tax revolt" meetings in dozens of municipalities across the province over the past couple of years. The CTF also presented a petition with the names of 12,500 taxpayers to Premier Calvert last March demanding a significant decrease in education taxes to help ease the sting of the income problems many farmers and other citizens in rural areas faced.

The government's response was anemic to say the least. It offered up a temporary two-year 10% reduction in school taxes on farmland. This stop-gap program is scheduled to end this year, with no additional relief in sight for farmers, never mind other property taxpayers many of whom are also paying through the nose.

The government just doesn't seem to want to listen. But as the old saying goes: you can only stick your head in the sand for so long before someone comes along and kicks you in the butt.