Health care workers in Saskatchewan are angry and disappointed that the provincial government is threatening them with redeploying them from their normal jobs.

So says the three unions that represent health care providers in the province. The Saskatchewan Government said on September 10 that they would issue an emergency order on September 13 if talks with the unions didn’t result in an agreement to allow for employee redeployment. A previously negotiated Letter of Understanding between the Saskatchewan Health Authority and the health care worker’s unions allowed the S-H-A to move workers between different jobs in order to meet the province’s pandemic response. That L-O-U expired in July, but the government’s emergency order would bring back that L-O-U in order to help with increasing COVID-19 case and hospitalization levels due to the novel coronavirus. The unions accuse the government of making health care workers scapegoats with their threat.