Saskatoon’s Emergency Wellness Centre will not be able to run an overnight warming centre this year, and Tribal Chief Mark Arcand is asking other organizations in the city to step up.
“I think it’s a necessary situation that we need to address immediately,” Arcand said.
He said the city is behind the 8-ball when it comes to shelters for people during the winter, saying it’s cold outside right now and we shouldn’t be waiting to open facilities.
Arcand said they ran into some budget deficits last year by holding a warming centre overnight for extra people when their beds were already full.
“We were taking in extra people, 50 to 70 people per night. We’re not allowed to do that anymore by government funding requirements that say we’re only allowed to take care of 106 people.”
People are being turned away now at the Emergency Wellness Centre, with Arcand saying it’s been a tough decision.
“When you’re only being funded so much by government, we can’t go outside of that, they made it very clear, and so we’ve got to abide by the rules and regulations.”
He said they have a transportation program that brings people to similar services, but said there’s nowhere for the program to take them right now.
Arcand feels like people have been dragging their feet coming up with a cold weather strategy for Saskatoon, saying we’re already late in implementing a plan.
“We need other organizations to come together and have this plan ready, like, within the next week here.”
Pamela Goulden-McLeod, the director of emergency management in Saskatoon, said the city has the extreme cold weather emergency response plan but partners in the program are already working.
“We have about nine partners that offer warming locations, and I think with that, that’s close to 20 different locations that they can go to for warming,” Goulden-McLeod said.
Most of those warming stations run throughout the day, with the latest one running until about 10 p.m.
She said they are looking at getting an overnight warming location, but that it likely won’t land until December.
“Which is really late. Ideally, we would have it open already, but unfortunately, that’s the best we can do this year.”
Goulden-McLeod said the situation is really concerning and that fire crews are making the rounds looking for people who might be in distress.
She said there are more homeless people in Saskatoon than there are places for them to go, and this isn’t a new problem in the city.
Goulden-McLeod said meetings have already happened around the extreme cold weather response, noting some plans are in place.
“We have over 35 partners involved in that.”
The response activates when the weather hits below -30 C, but Goulden-McLeod said people are still at risk when it gets around -20 C.
One Saskatoon resident has been working to offer a warming space for people overnight in the form of a warm-up bus.
Ralph Nicotine, the founder of Church in the Hood Ministries, which started in 2014, said that due to a death last year from the cold weather, he wanted to do more to help people.
Nicotine had a bus leased out in the winter of 2022 to help people stay warm.
“We went out there five or six times a week, just hanging out, making coffee, chatting with people, seeing where they came from, and why are they in this position,” Nicotine said.
He said they built relationships and saw support for what they were doing grow.
Nicotine said they had a minimum of 50 people throughout each night using the bus.
“The most? I’d say throughout the night probably 200.”
He said now they are looking to buy a bus of their own, so that they can make alterations to create a more open space for people.
Nicotine started a GoFundMe page with a goal of hitting $10,000, which almost has $4,000 gathered so far.
Global News reached out to the provincial government regarding Arcand’s comments and received a statement.
“The Ministry of Social Services has contracted STC to provide shelter spaces and supports for up to 106 people at the Emergency Wellness Centre. The Ministry of Social Services contracts do not include funding to support warm up site services,” the statement read.
The province touched on the Provincial Approach to Homelessness plan that was announced at the beginning of October, adding that more information regarding cold weather strategies for communities would be coming out later this week.
– With files from Montana Getty
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