Valerie G. Barnes Connell Jordan
Northern Advocate
Jordan McPhail, MLA for Cumberland and NDP Shadow Minister for Northern Affairs, Forestry and SaskTel, brought three of his colleagues into northern Saskatchewan to begin a northern Tour Feb. 25 and 26.
On the first leg of the tour, Brittney Senger, MLA for Saskatoon Southeast and Shadow Minister for Status of Women, Disabilities and Community Organizations; April ChiefCalf, MLA for Saskatoon Westview and Shadow Minister for Housing; and Brent Blakley, MLA for Regina Wascana Plains and Shadow Minister for Social Services; spent some time in Prince Albert before travelling to La Ronge.
While in La Ronge, the group met with and toured several community organizations.
For Senger it was her first time in the north,
“This is the furthest north I’ve been and it’s beautiful,” she said in an interview with the Northern Advocate. “I am listening and learning and really seeing the unique challenges that there are up here.”
Blakley said he’s been to the north once before several years ago. He was eager for the second trip, and excited to learn more.
“I think sometimes us folks in the city can get tunnel vision,” he said. ”We concentrate on our little area in the south, or in the city, so that’s one of the reasons I wanted to come up and just to see what Jordan said are some of the challenges northerners face.
“The province is huge, and we don’t want to concentrate on just the southern half,” he added.
ChiefCalf lived and worked in La Ronge for many years, but, she said, “I think in some ways I’m seeing it in a different way because I’m more focus on issues that maybe I wasn’t focus on so much when I lived here. Before I was more focused on education. I’m looking at housing and just understanding that things have got much more difficult for people in terms of finding a place to live. Affordability is a challenge, and the communities are having such a struggle with having shelter available and that is different when I lived here.”
She said the Scattered Site Outreach Program (SSOP) was also operating when she lived in the north. SSOP provided space and resources for people living with mental health, addictions and homelessness but was closed at the end of June 2024.
“(We’re) just seeing the challenges of the community is facing in dealing with a number of unhoused people,” she said.
ChiefCalf also said the group met with the Tri-Community Housing Strategy and visited the shelter set up at Kitsaki Hall on reserve and “what we learned from those discussions is how difficult it is in a unique community like La Ronge that has municipal, provincial and then reserve [federal] and to finding funding from those entities and get to work collaborative to fund the shelter where right now the location is on reserve. … and so it’s very difficult to find funding for that shelter, because everybody’s saying, ‘it’s not my jurisdiction. It’s not our job to fund this.’”
She also saw that it’s important to reach out to the north, to more communities than just La Ronge.
“The north is unique, and we need to understand that.”
For McPhail, bringing his colleagues to the north is two-fold, making them are of the challenges and bringing them into connection with people living in the north.
One of the issues McPhail said he hears about often is the resource extraction.
“For me, when I go into northern communities talking about Mayor and Council, industry leaders, a lot of them have the same responses that there is billions of resources that leave the north, and millions are returned. Where you have a huge disparity between the amount of resources leaving and not enough coming back.”
Mainly, McPhail’s purpose is to get northerners voices heard.
“It’s my goal to make sure all the organizations that are reaching out to us and trusting us to stand up for that, that we’re doing that in the best say, shape and form. To me, I am really proud of the work our team is doing and I’m really glad to see our colleagues take the time out of their constituency to come up into the north, into my home constituency, and see the issues that we face every single day.”
This was the first leg of the northern tour and McPhail is working on bringing more colleagues, more attention to the unique challenges of the area and taking the northern tour further into the far north.
