The former Fire Hall on Central Avenue is no longer an option for an emergency shelter in Saskatoon. That’s because after hours of discussion by City Council, a motion was passed to add the criteria for the search to include the facility being at least 250 metres away from an elementary school. Bishop Filevich Ukrainian Bilingual School is nearby, so that takes that option away. Administration has also been asked to report back on what a distributed approach to the search would look like, meaning not having shelters near each other.

Mayor Charlie Clark spoke to reporters prior to the Council meeting. He says when he was walking to work, he noticed a man sleeping outside the downtown library. The man said he slept there overnight in the -40 weather. Clark realizes this man is just one of many who were out in that extreme cold.

He calls the situation around finding locations for shelters completely challenging. “If every place we look to develop a shelter there is not an acceptance to do it or not a path forward to get it built we are not going to solve this dilemma and we are going to have more people dying out on our streets so we’ve got to figure this out.” He understands no one wants to live close to a shelter or have one close to a school or a park, but he adds, “We know people don’t want to have people sleeping in ATMs or on the riverbank or in their back alleys or in encampments and we also know there has been an exponential increase in the number of people homeless in our city and across the country.”