Jason Mercredi, Executive Director of Aids Saskatoon, says they are hopeful that Plan A – funding from the province for Saskatchewan’s first Safe Consumption Site – will work out. The provincial budget is being delivered, belatedly because of COVID-19, on Monday.

However, he says they are working on a plan B, which they aren’t announcing yet but stresses they are opening, in some capacity, “come hell or high water”, in the latter half of 2020. Jason Mercredi says pandemic isolation did not help in terms of addicts and overdoses and they need to be engaging those people to reconnect them with services.

Mercredi says they were told they weren’t going to get provincial funding back in February and beginning of March, but did receive $130 thousand for two case manager positions. However, their original “ask” was for $1.3 million for a 24 hour, 365 day a year facility.

Mercredi says he hopes they may still get a piece of the pie given the overdoses in the province, to operate Saskatchewan’s first safe consumption site, even on a scaled down model. Mercredi says hard drugs keep coming into the community and normally they distribute between 40 to 50 naloxone kits a month however, in May, distributed 193. He expects the number will be higher in June. Mercredi also points to the 262 overdose calls that Medavie Health Services recorded in May which is 20 more than Edmonton and Edmonton has three times Saskatoon’s population.

The facility in the 15-hundred block of 20th Street West, in Saskatoon’s Pleasant Hill neighbourhood, is next door to the Saskatoon Tribal Council Health Centre which is one of the busiest needle exchanges in the province. They are also next to the West Side Clinic which services a lot of the Consumption Site’s potential clientele plus they are near Brief and Social Detox, the methadone program and St. Paul’s Hospital.