Dozens of people turned out to a summit on Saturday to give their input on what they hope the future of Saskatchewan holds.
Health, the environment and poverty all topped the agenda in a room full of big ideas and brainstorming.
“I want people to think about what transformational change means, and is it what the government is currently doing,” said Simon Enoch, a spokesman for SaskForward, which is a coalition of civil society organizations that sponsored the event. “Is it just merely a cost-cutting exercise or do we have a larger, wider vision for what we want Saskatchewan to be going into the future?”
Dr. Sally Mahood, a family physician for more than 35 years, thinks that investing in family medicine will help save money in hospitals and acute care.
“A lot of people don’t have family doctors they can go to. They don’t have a nurse they can phone and say, ‘do I need to worry about this,’” she said. “If they had a continuity relationship with a team where they could phone or come in and be seen, we could keep a lot of people out of emergency.”
Mahood also supports the idea of neigbourhood community clinics that would include mental health workers. She said these clinics would help health care workers and patients to know each other better.
“They’d have a lot more continuity with us, faith in what we say,” Mahood said, adding that the clinic could still be the entry to acute care.
“If somebody needs to go to the hospital, we send them, but we could deal with a lot of things in the community that we currently use hospitals for,” she said.
Regina’s Anti-Poverty Ministry wants to make sure those who didn’t benefit from the province’s boom aren’t getting hit by the bust.
“We think it’s those who benefited most from the boom that should be giving back the most in tougher economic times, rather than expecting to cut from those who it will certainly hurt the most,” Peter Gilmer, an advocate with Regina’s Anti-Poverty Ministry, said.
Meanwhile, environmentalists said they’re hoping for a shift in the way people think.
“I think there’s a lot of fear that’s associated with our dependency on maybe fossil fuels and extractive resource industries that’s preventing a lot of better choices we could make around environmental issues. I’d like people to look at the positives our province has. We have tremendous solar and wind potential in the province,” Hayley Carlson, Saskatchewan Environmental Society’s policy co-ordinator, said.
SaskForward will take Saturday’s discussions and online submissions and compile them into recommendations for the provincial government ahead of the next budget.
Comments