Heading into the presentation of the 2008 budget, the federal Conservatives were facing some extraordinary pressures, more so than most any government usually has with many requests for funding.

As they are a minority government, they are subject to pressures from the opposition, who can realistically bring the government down as this is their major money bill of the year and therefore is a matter of confidence.

On top of this is a country where some areas are performing brightly in an economic sense (us here in Saskatchewan particularly) and other areas are not doing so well, thus they put pressure on the government to do something. One such area is the livestock industry across the country, trying to deal with low prices for their product while paying absurdly high feed prices, not to mention high input costs due mostly to even more absurdly high.

Thus, when Finance minister Jim Flaherty brought his budget down on Feb. 26, there were many, many expectations on him and on his government to provide some answers.

Helping the government was a higher surplus than was originally planned for, which will help in debt reduction this year in the order of $10.2 billion, and helping taxpayers were cuts in taxes retroactive to 2007

In addition, one surprise for taxpayers is the offer of a tax-free savings account, similar in concept to an RSP but not really intended for one's retirement years. This tax-free savings account allows a person to sock away up to $5,000 a year in the account.

For the southeast area, the government is putting forward an initiative in which Saskatchewan will get $240 million, to be matched by the province, for a CO2 capture and storage demonstration project at the Boundary Dam. There is also provision for pipelines that carry CO2, but it's unclear if this is meant for EnCana's CO2 pipeline, or for pipelines yet to be built as part of the Boundary Dam project.

Municipalities were looking for hope through the Gas Tax Fund, which is said to be worth $2 billion by 2009-10 to go towards infrastructure projects. Will this trickle down to a small municipality like Weyburn? Only time will tell on that score.

And will there be a federal election triggered from this budget? To listen to the Liberal leader after the budget, Dion seems reluctant to bring Harper down just yet after virtually promising to do so earlier; one can only hope he is speaking truthfully and won't act to take us to an election.

One area that has been left wondering are our livestock producers; nothing new was said, only a repeat of the loan program that was announced earlier. Why can nothing more concrete than that be provided to those caught in a bad situation?

In many ways, this was a no-frills budget that provided a safe way through for the Conservatives to live and govern another day. - Greg Nikkel