Saskatoon rejects calls for designated encampment areas for city’s homeless

WATCH: A rally outside Saskatoon City Hall on Wednesday called for the city to create designated homeless encampment areas, and the city is refusing.

A rally for Saskatoon’s homeless population outside city hall on Wednesday called for the city to create designated homeless encampment areas, and the city is refusing.

“If somebody had the recipe, and it was successful, we would definitely have duplicated it here,” Saskatoon Fire Department deputy chief Yvonne Raymer said. “Some of the things that you see is like disease outbreak, overdoses, the fires, there’s actually a lot of violence, human trafficking. They can turn very unsafe.”

Raymer, who has been increasingly involved in working alongside homeless populations and address community risk reduction in recent years, says city after city who have tried to implement centralized encampments are warning against others to do the same because of how unsafe they can be.

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“Those individuals sometimes end up being infiltrated by even gang activity and drug use, and drug selling becomes kind of a prominent concern,” Raymer said.

Encampments can also be a costly endeavor. Raymer says Halifax spent $1-million to clean up and move a centralized encampment. Those costs are piling up for Saskatoon taxpayers. The fire department alone has spent nearly $1-million from November 2021 to September 2025 responding to encampments, which doesn’t include construction, remediation costs or other city departments. Costs passed on to private properties are also difficult to track.

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More than two dozen people rallying in the cold at Civic Square on Wednesday say if the city isn’t prepared to create a centralized area, there will be consequences.

“If they won’t allow it, then we may as well start counting the people that we’re going to lose,” Jessica LaPlante said.

LaPlante briefly lost her daughter to trafficking six years ago and has been involved in advocacy ever since. She says there could be multiple designated areas to avoid a centralized area of concern for first responders and outreach workers.

“We’re going to have small encampments all over the place in designated areas. That way they can’t get overflowing,” she said.

Raymer says fires are an obvious concern as well when encampments grow large. In the last two months, crews have responded to 90 encampments. At one point, the backlog to respond to an encampment was at 104, which has since been reduced to 90.

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Raymer says it will take five to seven days for firefighters to get to all remaining encampments.

The city is asking residents to keep an eye out for people living in encampments and keep reporting them to the city so they can be connected to safe supports.

“That is stupid,” David Fineday, an advocate for homeless people in Saskatoon, said. “They’re displacing those people.”

The latest point-in-time count from the city, conducted in October and released late last month, found 1,931 people without adequate housing, a rise of 432 people since the 2024 count.

Raymer says encampments aren’t just cleared unannounced. There is a dialogue with people living in encampments and outreach workers, and other organizations are on hand when it comes time to clear out an encampment.

“Anybody that is offered to take support from the encampments has managed to find a place, and we will exhaust every avenue,” Raymer said.

Raymer says homelessness and social services are ultimately provincial responsibilities the city has stepped up to help address in recent years. The province announced a new approach to homelessness and addictions in October 2023, and Raymer says the fire department has had to add more resources to the file since then.

“We have not seen a downward trend. We have seen nothing but an upward trend,” Raymer said. “There are a lot of individuals who are actually not connected to Saskatoon but get here because of their services here. ”

The city estimates the number of homeless people in Saskatoon has tripled since 2022.