Saskatchewan’s election campaign has scarcely mentioned the homelessness crisis afflicting cities like Saskatoon, Regina and Prince Albert.
You can see it on the campaign websites and in the social media posts of council candidates, many of whom propose to address homelessness — some while paradoxically promising lower property taxes.
So you might well expect and even demand that homelessness feature prominently in the provincial election debate.
You might anticipate a greater focus from the Saskatchewan NDP, given its strength in the urban areas facing a crisis right now.
But the NDP platform only mentions homelessness twice, both times in its section on getting “tough on crime,” saying it will address the “root causes of crime.”
The scope of the homelessness problem can be difficult to accurately capture, for obvious reasons.
But fire department statistics in Saskatoon suggest it could be substantially worse than last year, with 683 “inadequately housed individuals” identified from January to mid-September, which is almost double the 366 identified in all of last year.
Saskatoon Tribal Chief Mark Arcand has said preliminary information from the ongoing homeless count suggests 800 homeless people in the city. The official count is expected by year’s end.
The Saskatchewan Coroners Service recorded 18 deaths from exposure or hypothermia two winters ago in urban areas — by far the most in the last 16 years, and with investigations still ongoing.
These deaths may not be directly linked to homelessness, but drugs or alcohol were ruled contributing factors in 26 out of 28 such deaths provincially during the winter of 2022-23.
When asked last week, Saskatchewan Party Leader Scott Moe pointed to his government’s multi-pronged approach to address homelessness, mental health and addictions. Moe dismissed the idea of looking solely at the number of temporary shelter spaces to judge the strategy.
But he also suggested an NDP government might decriminalize hard drugs, which, to my knowledge, has never been proposed by Saskatchewan’s NDP. British Columbia’s NDP government experimented with decriminalizing drugs, but reversed part of that strategy this year in response to public backlash.
Saskatchewan NDP Leader Carla Beck last week denied any such decriminalization plan.
But Beck blasted the changes by Moe’s government to the Saskatchewan Income Support program as a “frankly stupid” move that reflects her opponents’ refusal to listen to advice. Beck said the widely criticized decision to end SIS payments directly to landlords and utility providers has made homelessness worse.
She said an NDP government would reverse the SIS change.
“It’s time you had a government that will take advice, that will listen when they’re trying to address these very complicated issues,” Beck said.
Yet with drug toxicity deaths reaching an annual provincial high of 410 last year and another 52 suspected, according to the coroners service, it hardly qualifies as an area where Moe’s government can claim even a sliver of success.
The 2023 overdose deaths in Regina (176) again far outpace those in much larger Saskatoon (95). The obvious explanation for this is that Saskatoon has a much more established safe consumption site, Prairie Harm Reduction.
Regardless, like homelessness, the epidemic of overdose deaths deserves more attention than it’s getting so far in this provincial election.
Phil Tank is the digital opinion editor at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
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