The Lac La Ronge Indian Band (LLRIB) is working to ensure urban members stay connected with their traditional, land-based ways of life.

LLRIB councillors, along with the health services’ cultural unit, put on an urban cultures days for members in the Prince Albert area on Tuesday and Wednesday.

“Many of our members that live in the city come to get education or employment. When you’re in the city, it’s a disconnect to culture and language,” said Lillian Sanderson, cultural program manager.

“Up north in La Ronge and our other outlying communities, we’re very land-based and a lot of our people are still out on the land, hunting, fishing, gathering.”

Those Indigenous values were at the forefront of the event at the Prince Albert Wildlife Federation. Members could learn about drying bison meat, beading, paddle making, jigging, basket weaving and traditional medicines.

Another important aspect of the culture is the Cree language.

“One of the goals, of course, with our band is to revive our language and be able to pass that on as language keepers, that it’s okay to speak their language. At one time, we weren’t allowed,” said Sanderson.

Chief Tammy Cook-Searson is also fluent in Cree. She said bringing members together helps to ensure the language continues on to the younger generation.

“For me, if I see somebody that’s Cree, automatically I’ll just start conversing in Cree,” she said.

“If there’s people around us, they’ll ask what we’re saying or we’ll see someone we know and they’ll ask ‘How do you say this?’”

Whether it’s language or land-based practices, Cook-Searson said bringing people together promotes their Indigenous culture.

“We have such amazing traditional resource people that are ready and willing to share their knowledge and they want to pass it on, but it takes time and patience for someone to want to learn that,” she said.

Cook-Searson said the LLRIB has roughly 900 urban members in the Prince Albert area.

“It’s a huge population. That’s even bigger than some of our communities.”

LLRIB consists of six communities: La Ronge, Little Red River, Morin Lake, Stanley Mission, Sucker River and Grandmother’s Bay.

A northern Saskatchewan wellness camp is receiving funding stability from the provincial government.

The province has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Kineepik Métis Local #9, which operates the Muskwa Lake Wellness Camp in Pinehouse. 

The committed dollars allow the camp to continue providing northern residents with cultural mental health and addictions support.

“It’s been ran on a limited capacity financially for all these years,” said Kimberly Smith, health and wellness manager for Kineepik Métis Local #9.

For the past 40 years, the camp has survived off of volunteers, donations and support from the Northern Village of Pinehouse.

“The increase in the heavier drug use has really impacted most rural and northern communities at a rate that it’s hard to keep up with,” said Smith, hoping the province’s commitment inspires other programs to start up.

“Anybody in any community can start how we started at our grassroots level and then hopefully build up.”

Smith said the Muskwa Lake Wellness Camp provides a holistic approach to healing. Historically, it’s strictly focused on drug and alcohol rehabilitation.

“The south follows a lot of ceremonial traditions. Our ways in the north are land-based, which are really tied and connected to the land, and that’s where a lot of our learning is.”

This includes activities such as fishing, filleting, berry picking, making bannock and listening to Elders. Staff also provide employment support, such as helping purchase equipment, get government IDs, and build resumes.

It follows a braided approach, explained Smith, between western, First Nation and Métis values.

“When we talk about suicide, family dysfunction, lack of employment, what our program does is try to build up the whole individual, by not just addressing one component of their life,” she said.

On Tuesday, the Saskatchewan government announced it’s providing $246,000 to the camp. Smith said the money will be used towards building three cabins and a main lodge, which will allow the program to run year-round.

The MOU includes $700,000 in operational funding for this fiscal year. According to a news release, this allows 105 people to access its services.

“I want to thank Muskwa Lake Wellness Camp for the work they have done and continue to do in delivering culturally responsive care for Saskatchewan residents,” said Tim McLeod, mental health and addictions minister.

Smith said the late Leonard McCallum started the program.

Struggling with addictions himself, he travelled to several rehabilitation centres in the south. But when he’d return, he’d fall back on his alcohol use.

Smith said their approach has changed since then to address generational trauma, ensuring the health of Indigenous people lasts into the future.

“The world right now is designed to disconnect all of us. We, as humans, have a need for connection,” she said.

“We have to reclaim and almost fight for that peace back.”

The City of Prince Albert is hiring for a new position that will lead a larger project on social issues and community safety.

According to Craig Guidinger, director of planning and development services, the city put in a project proposal to Public Safety Canada. It received funding from the Building Safer Communities Fund, which is focused on guns and gang violence.

Part of the proposal was hiring a Community Safety and Well-Being Coordinator.

“The first place people go to if there’s issues is number one, City Hall, or maybe police, and we’re never sure exactly where we fit – whose responsibility is it to tackle social issues?” asked Guidinger.

“Facilitating discussions and getting the right people in the room, that’s where our role is and I think that’s where we, as a city, can be most effective.”

The Community Safety and Well-Being Coordinator will be the point of contact for the Chronic Risk Solutions Forum. The forum, started through the 2021-22 homelessness action initiative, is in partnership with the Living Skies Centre for Social Inquiry.

The successful candidate will work with community groups, such as the Indian and Metis Friendship Centre, the YWCA and the Riverbank Development Corporation, as well as public health, businesses and Indigenous leaders like the Prince Albert Grand Council.

The overall goal, explained Guidinger, is to develop new programming and prevention strategies for issues such as homelessness, housing, addictions and food insecurity.

“We want the community and we want the social service providers to tell us where the money needs to be spent, and then that’s where we’ll kind of focus our efforts,” he said.

“I assume that a shelter will be a discussion that comes up at the table and what can be done there, or maybe it’s something smaller, like we need to provide meals.”

The Prince Albert Outreach Program provides cultural services to vulnerable populations. This includes distributing food and hygiene packs, helping youth navigate through the justice system and help with re-integration after being released from custody.

Executive director Bill Chow said it’s an important issue for the city to address.

“If they don’t have this position, it’s going to continue to flounder or there’s going to be a lot of questions still being asked and no one providing the answers,” he said.

“Hopefully this position can put some of those answers together collectively, but it’s not going to be an easy position to fulfill.”

Chow said PA Outreach has its own struggles in trying to help those in need. For example, he said people sometimes take advantage of free food, potentially taking away from people most at risk of food insecurity.

“We want to provide food for them, but we also don’t want them to become totally dependent upon us,” said Chow.

“The situation is more complex than, at times, we want to think it is.”

Chow, a former police officer, said he’s noticed a spike in homelessness in recent years – and it’s hard to say why. He said it could be an effect of changes to the Saskatchewan Income Support (SIS) program, where rent money no longer goes directly to landlords.

“I never want to say it’s not a city responsibility,” said Guidinger.

“With some research that we’ve done over the last year, we’ve determined that the city is really the catalyst or the backbone to help navigate through those issues.”

Chad Nilson with the Living Skies Centre for Social Inquiry has been conducting research for the city’s Chronic Risk Solutions Forum.

“It involves changes, it involves innovation in social policy and it changes the way in which our organizations are going to work,” he said about the position in a video posted on the city’s website.

Participants of the homelessness action initiative brought up several issues in the planning stages of the forum. This included a lack of a permanent homeless shelter, discarded needles, no networking mechanism within the social services sector and a lack of chronic risk management in both shelters and community settings.

Guidinger said the city is no longer taking applications for the Community Safety and Well-Being Coordinator and is working on conducting interviews.

He’s hoping to have someone in place by fall.

A multi-agency traffic safety blitz is bringing more education and enforcement to Prince Albert.

The Selective Traffic Enforcement Program (STEP) is taking place on Wednesday and Thursday at three locations within city limits, along with a commercial vehicle inspection station at the Highway 11 and Highway 2 junction.

The blitz includes several municipal police agencies, the RCMP, Saskatchewan Highway Patrol, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific police, the Ministries of Justice and Finance, and SGI.

Officers are looking for common issues such as impaired driving, distracted driving, speeding, improper car seats, improper car seat installation and unregistered vehicles, according to Sgt. Brian Glynn.

“The main goal, the main purpose, is traffic safety education,” said Glynn.

“There will be some tickets handed out, but there will also be some warnings and just some overall traffic safety, especially as far as the car seat stuff goes.”

SGI has car seat technicians on scene, and is able to provide families in need with proper car seats for their children.

Michaela Solomon with SGI said ensuring children are in proper car seats, along with those seats being properly installed, is “top of mind.”

A news release from earlier this month said so far this year, RCMP have recorded nearly 200 children under the age of seven who were not properly restrained in a vehicle. There were also 49 children between the ages of seven and 15 who were not safely contained. 

“The goal of this is really to take traffic enforcement and education to different communities and not only correcting unsafe behaviour, but ensuring that the community is educated and updated on what best practices are,” said Solomon.

She said SGI hosts the STEP blitz in Prince Albert, Saskatoon, Regina, Moose Jaw, Yorkton and Estevan.

Another focus is impaired driving.

“The STEP enforcement program is to really encourage people to understand the dangers of impaired driving and the importance of finding a safe ride,” said Solomon.

Whether you’re consuming alcohol or drugs, she said, get home safely by using public transit, a taxi, walking or calling a family member or friend.

SGI’s most recent statistics come from its June Traffic Safety Spotlight.

Saskatchewan police recorded 1,097 distracted driving offences, including 970 for cellphone use – this is the first time since 2019 the monthly recorded number has exceeded a thousand.

Officers also saw 410 people driving after exceeding the legal limits of alcohol or drugs, 5,121 tickets for speeding or aggressive driving, and 706 seatbelt tickets.

“We all kind of pool our resources together to get that traffic enforcement and education to those communities,” added Solomon.

Glynn said those combined efforts give Prince Albert a much higher number of officers focused of traffic.

“I think there’s 25 people, so that will allow us to set up in some different locations and just have a bigger footprint to achieve what we need to achieve in these two days.”

Glynn is in charge of traffic with the Prince Albert Police Service and Combined Traffic Services Saskatchewan, which mainly focuses efforts on highways.

The City of Prince Albert says its operations are not currently impacted from a union strike involving inside workers.

According to a news release, the city came up with backup plans to ensure operations could continue in the short-term. At a media conference last month, Mayor Greg Dionne said the city would bring in employees who are not included in the bargaining unit.

Aside from operations at City Hall, recreation facilities like the Kinsmen Water Park, Alfred Jenkins Field House, Arts Centre and arenas are not impacted. This also includes bylaw enforcement, building inspections and permit approvals.

Outside services such as garbage and recycling, which involves CUPE 160 employees, are also not impacted.

The city said it received notice from CUPE 882 that employees would be commencing a strike starting on Thursday, beginning with refusal to train management, contractors and coworkers.

“This is obviously disappointing. It is clear that no matter how much we give, they want more,” said Kiley Bear, director of corporate services.

The city offered CUPE 882 a general wage increase of 11 per cent over four years. The lowest paid employees would receive an additional .5 per cent.

CUPE 882 countered with a 12 per cent increase, which the city rejected.

At a media conference on Thursday, the union’s vice-president Cara Stelmaschuk said the strike may progress to a full removal of services if a new contract is not agreed upon.

“It’s harder for things to carry on if we aren’t in the office,” said Stelmaschuk.

“That was level one and a good starting point to really point out to the workplace, your people do all this work for you and the amount that they actually are dependent on. It really strikes that chord that you need us. We’re not replaceable.”

CUPE 882 members have been without a contract since December 2021.

 – with files from Nathan Reiter

Prince Albert’s interim police Chief Patrick Nogier sat down with the Herald to discuss how the organization is working towards re-gaining confidence, both from the wider community and from its own members. As Nogier explains, this involves a complex re-evaluation of its operations, including improved communication, an alternative call response and building relationships with community organizations.

Please note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Tell us about your work in your previous position with the Saskatoon Police Service.

A: I’ve got roughly 28, 29 years of policing with the Saskatoon Police Service. I’ve been very fortunate to fill a variety of positions. I did a stint in communications, and I had come from a world of K9, patrol and investigations and to go there as a supervisor, I was really questioning why I was being put in that position, but in hindsight, it was a really valuable experience. My current role there was superintendent in charge of the Criminal Investigations Division. It’s roughly 147 different people. There, we’ve got a wide variety within the Criminal Investigations Division – everything from a guns and gangs team, to a major crime unit, to forensic identification, sexual assault, both adult and children.

Q: Knowing the circumstances former Chief Jon Bergen left under, saying he and his family were receiving harassment both from the community and internally, how did you feel taking this interim role?

A: Nothing that happened in Prince Albert is unique. You can pull out various different organizations that have gone through trials and tribulations and peaks and valleys. Unfortunately, for the PAPS, they seem to be going through a bit of a valley and trying to find where the peak is again. Yes, it was a concern. A concern only in the fact that I wasn’t sure it was valid – what was the validity to it? When it comes to people expressing views through social media, that’s a very small opinion, in my opinion, and I don’t take a lot of stock in it. I think that consultation comes from face-to-face communication and it’s through that that you’ll determine the validity of people’s concerns.

Part of my response to coming to the organization wasn’t to investigate those or to be aware of those. Quite frankly, there’s so many other things that we’ve been working on that it’s the furthest thing from my mind.

Q: The Board of Police Commissioners and the Prince Albert Police Association said some of the 45 recommendations from Rod Knecht’s report have already been addressed. Which ones?

A: I knew what the recommendations were prior to coming, and when I came and I started looking into it, there were already initiatives that had been undertaken to achieve those goals, and this administration had no awareness of those recommendations or what they would be. That speaks volumes for the integrity of an organization to try to make sure that they were mapping a path forward.

Let me speak specifically about the alternative call response that we have. We’re currently in the process right now of developing a media strategy to ensure that the public understands the impact of having an alternative call response rather than sending officers. We talk about having a prioritization of calls – what are we sending our officers to? What can we afford to send them to with respect to making sure that they have a competent, adequate investigation and they’re providing a really good, calm environment when stressful times occur?

The day and age of us being able to be everything to everybody has come and gone. We know we’ve got high victimization; we’ve got a high violence rate. That requires an immediate police response. We know that there has to be a different type of resource allocation model.

We’ve prioritized now calls one through six, one being highest priority, need police assistance immediately. We’re responding to calls one, two and three and the calls four, five and six, if they can be triaged through another mechanism, that’s the path that we’ve taken.

If there’s a message for the public, it’s please don’t feel like it’s an all or nothing type of report, it means nothing, it’s a waste of their time to report it. We might be focusing on more of a hot button topic, but the individuals involved in that topic might also be associated to other types of crime that might not meet that severity index. But by making an arrest on that particular circumstance, it will inevitably have an impact on some of those lower crimes.

Q: Are there any other recommendations that stood out to you as wanting to implement as soon as possible?

A: They are all of concern for a chief of police. You have a board that wants to have enhanced structure; you have a board that wants to have a mandate that makes sense; you have a board that wants to be involved in policing operations within the community and that’s a responsibility for ensuring that the competency and the operation of the organization is sufficient – and that makes sense. From a chief’s perspective, providing feedback with respect to recommendations from the board is an important part.

The association, they play an essential role in providing the administration with the temperature of the organization. They have the best interests of the individuals, the men and women that put the uniform on, and the civilians that do all of the support services within the organization. That relationship needs to be very good, very open, very transparent.

Q: You’ve said that transparency with the public is important to you. In what ways are you doing that?

A: Transparency means that I will provide sufficient information so that people can understand the context by which my decisions are being made. I hope to be transparent in that capacity, so I’ll run up to the line that I know I’m limited to provide the detail that I know is likely what the public wants.

Without going into a specific case, it would probably pertain to every time you have a situation where an officer has been charged criminally while acting in the capacity of their duties. That will always be a situation where the public wants to know who, when, why, how. I think we’re all guilty at times at jumping to conclusions about how something happened and why, and that’s why we have process and, in particular, court process.

The chief will take certain actions to ensure that the public is satisfied that there’s no issue there that needs to be addressed, so whether it’s relieving an officer from duty, whether it’s reassigning them to administrative duties while that process is being playing out. Every situation is unique, there should be no cookie cutter approach to the decisions that are made.

Q: Indigenous leaders have said recent incidents, including the in-custody death of Saul Laliberte, are acts of systemic racism. What are you doing to ensure that all community members are treated with the same respect?

A: It starts right at training. It’s reinforcing good behaviours within the organization through discussion. It’s ensuring that your senior staff within the organization are having discussions and, quite frankly, holding officers accountable when maybe they sway across the line of having that respect and dignity in situations that sometimes are very difficult to pursue.

As a profession, I think we’ve acknowledged the fact that you have to continually review policies and protocols and sometimes inherently, there’s going to be some type of bias that you’re not even aware of that exists in current policies and practices that you have to be aware of and potentially pivot on. We’re having those discussions internally, we’re starting at the highest levels with administration, we’re filtering it down.

The other thing, too, is you’re looking to enhance relationships within the community, whether that be through the Prince Albert Grand Council, through the FSIN and I must say that in both circumstances, they’ve been very good to work with since I’ve been here. I think the other thing, too, is to ensure that you’re hiring with some diversity so you do have people that bring different ethnicities with them, different perspectives with them.

Q: In a recent interview with Chase Sinclair, a family member of Boden Umpherville, he said the police service first needs to recognize how response could have gone differently in order to have a repaired relationship. On behalf of the police service, what would you say to the loved ones of people who have died?

A: People need to understand that organizations are changing. When we consider a trauma-informed, discussion approach reaction, we’re still learning what that means with respect to front-line policing, to investigations, to victim service response.

We talk about victim advocate case review. What it entails is bringing an outside group to review closed sexual assault files so that they can provide you with feedback about how you may do your job differently. They have access to video, the interviews; they have access to any in-car system that may have captured something. They have access to every report and they have access to prosecutors requests. We are now getting feedback that allows us to pivot, and to have discussions with our investigators to say ‘You know, the way that you asked that question had an impact on that victim. The way you responded to that individual, look at it through this lens and how they may have felt.’ Little things that we’ve never seen before and that police have never done before are now occurring today.

Whether or not it expands to go from just sexual assaults into potentially homicide investigations or serious assault investigations is yet to be determined. But I think you’re seeing more conversations on behalf of chiefs of police that are now saying ‘We have to re-visit it.’

Q: You were appointed as chief temporarily, but is there the possibility of you becoming chief permanently?

A: I wouldn’t commit to any specific comment on that. What I can tell you right now is that I have a six-month contract that keeps me here relatively until November. If they found a chief that they wanted to bring in that met the criteria and fulfilled the mandate, then I would be on my way back to Saskatoon.