Opposition leader Ryan Meili was back in the Battlefords again Monday for a busy day of meetings and community functions.
Both Meili and Saskatoon Fairview MLA Vicki Mowat met with the Battlefords Chamber of Commerce in the morning and later spent time the Battlefords and District Food and Resource Centre. They also spent time in the morning meeting with Amber Stewart, who is running for the NDP nomination in the Battlefords.
In the afternoon they were scheduled to meet with the Town of Battleford and later with The Lighthouse Serving the Battlefords. The day was capped off with a barbecue with NDP members in the community.
In between those visits Meili and Mowat met the News-Optimist where they discussed some of the burning issues facing the province and the local community.
Seniors housing:
One of the topics discussed was the situation at Valleyview Tower II, which has been embroiled in controversy lately amid reports of drunkenness, disorderly conduct and drug use by tenants at the facility.
“We’re hearing about Valleyview II and other centres that should be seniors-only,” Meili said. He also said that he has heard a similar story in Prince Albert.
“I know I’ve heard this in Prince Albert and other communities as well, where due to changes in the way that they manage those buildings – changes in SaskParty government policy – they’ve decreased the number of seniors going in there or able to go in there, and they’ve instead been bringing in more younger people, younger people often in phases of life not coinciding well with retiring environment.”
He also pointed to safety concerns and concerns with mental health and addictions and other issues causing “local seniors to even choose to pay much higher rents, rents they can’t afford because they are not comfortable going into social housing. That’s something that clearly needs to be fixed.”
Meili said the concerns at Valleyview Towers are ones he has heard about from others in the community. He says they are just now reaching out to tenants to get a better sense of experience.
The policy had changed from a set below-market rate rental to tie it to a percentage of income, and that made it so that a lot of people found it was more affordable to go in the private sector than to stay with social housing. “Now they’re using those empty units to have other people housed there which is causing more people to turn away from those facilities.”
“We’ve got a shortage of housing, there’s a real need for social housing,” said Meili. “Doing it in an unsafe way is not the right approach.”
Poverty a concern:
Meili said there was a wide range of issues discussed with members of the Chamber in their meeting. One issue that stood out, which Meili said was reinforced in the visit with the Food Bank, was the “level of poverty in the area and how that really makes life difficult for those living in poverty.”
It was also “a drain on the community in so many ways – less economic activity, more challenges recruiting businesses to come up and recruiting people to come work here, the safety issues as well in the community. There’s a real recognition and understanding that there’s a need to address the levels of poverty locally, and that that’s been sorely neglected the last decade.”
The Saskatchewan Health Authority had also recently declared an HIV and syphilis outbreak in North Battleford. Meili pointed to the outbreak of HIV and syphilis as “absolutely connected to poverty.”
He called for a strategy to be put in place to deal with the poverty issue and raise peoples’ incomes. “Saskatchewan is the only province in the country without a poverty reduction strategy,” said Meili.
Mowat noted that at the food bank the point was made that “everything is interconnected.”
Having access to affordable child care can impact whether or not you need the Food Bank, they pointed out. “Often it can be the amount of money that you spend on groceries in a month that can end up being the difference there,” Mowat said.
Crime:
Meili said he had spent Thursday touring the inner-city Saskatoon on Thursday night with a member of a local safety patrol group who also took part in the Ashley Morin march from Saskatoon to North Battleford on the weekend.
They spoke about the “changing realities of crime” in Saskatoon, which was seeing an increase in violence seen, as well as an increase in crystal meth use. That was leading to an increase in property crime and in mental health breakdowns.
“There is a real crisis going on,” said Meili. He said it was “linked to poverty, linked to marginalization,” and was affecting indigenous and Metis more than the rest of the population.
“We need to recognize this is a real drain on our province as a whole. The people whose lives, who are in those difficult circumstances – their lives matter and we need to help them get out of those difficult situations.”
Sask Hospital:
The new Saskatchewan Hospital and the roof problems at the facility continue to be on Meili’s radar.
Meili said they have heard concerns about the “failures of the P3 project at the Sask Hospital – the roof in particular and how that’s resulting in now a backlog elsewhere as they are not able to have intake of new patients, challenges finding staff there as well.” He said that “caused question for how wisely the Sask Party is planning their building and management of that facility.”
Premiers’ conference:
Meili was an interested observer of the Council of the Federation meetings in Saskatoon last week involving all the provincial Premiers including host Premier Scott Moe. Many commentators noted the meetings lacked excitement and Meili’s reaction was no exception.
“It was kind of like watching paint dry,” Meili admitted.
But one interesting thing from those meetings that surprised him was that the “majority of the premiers were resisting the introduction of pharmacare, which just makes so little sense.”
Meili pointed to Canada being a country where people were paying the highest drug prices in the world, with “billions of dollars to be saved in provincial budgets by going the direction of pharmacare.”
“That was really disappointing to see, and important for us to watch going into the federal election as that becomes a key issue.”
Climate change:
Meili’s visit to the Battlefords came at the same time that more than 400 evacuees from Northern Ontario were staying in Saskatchewan to flee forest fires in that province.
Meili again expressed concern about the impact of climate change on those individuals.
“This year we’ve got climate refugees from Ontario in Saskatchewan, a couple of years ago we had climate refugees from northern Saskatchewan who were having to flee massive forest fires,” Meili said. He pointed to floods and droughts, and big changes in climate. “It is absolutely an emergency situation around the world.”
Meili took aim again at the Council of the Federation for failing to tackle the issue.
“One of the more concerning things there was we got provincial governments who don’t want to take real action on climate change, don’t want to show leadership. In particular, our province has been guilty of failing to set any targets whatsoever in terms of reduction of emissions,” said Meili.
“This is the big crisis facing the world.”
