Saskatoon cuts to city bottled water program leave advocate concerned

Community organizations working in Saskatoon’s core neighbourhoods say a cut in funding is leaving most vulnerable people thirsty. Keenan Sorokan reports.

Community organizations working in the city’s core neighbourhoods worry a cut in funding will leave some of Saskatoon’s most vulnerable people thirsty when they need it most.

Colleen Christopherson-Cote, co-ordinator of the Saskatoon Poverty Reduction Partnership, said about 100 people visited Station 20 West daily last summer to escape the heat and grab a bottle of water.

She learned in April that the city was eliminating $50,000 in funding her partnership used to buy and distribute roughly 2,000 bottles of water every week last year. She said so far this year, demand has more than quadrupled.

“Now we’re in the upwards of 400 or 450 people a day, “Christopherson-Cote said. “So we’re trying to figure out how we are going to better manage the inflow of people, particularly as the weather starts to get hot.”

After experiencing one heatwave already last week where temperatures saw daytime highs above 30 C, she said the partnership has been struggling to find a solution to keep bottled water in the hands of those who need it most during hot weather.

“We were just left with the idea that none of us could resource it because we’re constantly expected to pick up the slack when government decides to make a decision unilaterally to cut resources or to not resource something that we think is their fiduciary obligation to resource,” she said.

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Two bottle-filling stations are located in Pleasant Hill. One is at the Saskatoon Community Clinic and the other is at Central Urban Metis Federation Inc. (CUMFI). Bottled water is also distributed at CUMFI.

Christopherson-Cote feels that won’t cut it with all of those options available last year before demand spiked.

“They’ve cut the water distribution and told us to just lean into the other infrastructure. But there’s no increase in capacity for the other infrastructure. But there’s four times more people needing access to service,” she said.

The $50,000 funding cut was part of a larger item that was eliminated during last fall’s budget deliberations.

Leslie Anderson, the city’s director of planning and development, told councillors gathered at a committee meeting on May 13 that the bottled water was only funded for a few years and wasn’t included in any larger program without dedicated funding.

“It started during COVID, and there were other agencies that were handing out water as well,” she said during the meeting. “So the last year when we did it, it hadn’t really been built into a long-term program. If we didn’t have the budget for it, it wasn’t a service that we have built into any other operations.”