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Saskatoon’s firefighters union is raising concerns about the city’s overdose crisis, weeks after the city’s only safe consumption site shuttered its doors.
Jay Protz, president of IAFF Saskatoon Firefighters Local 80, says his members are noticing an unprecedented increase in calls for service over the past few weeks, putting more pressure on crews and resources.
“We just don’t have the capacity to keep going to the same call over and over, and then throw in a fire, throw in a heart attack, throw in all these other calls that we go to,” Protz told Global News in an interview.
“Those pressures start to wear on people.”
Prairie Harm Reduction (PHR), which offered supervised consumption and other drop-in services, closed its doors on April 9 following a financial shortfall of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Since the non-profit organization’s shutdown, fire crews have been responding to around 16 overdose calls every day, tying them up when they could be responding to other calls, said Protz.
“We want to make sure that we’re there, we’re the tip of the spear, and we’re responding appropriately to all emergencies and mitigating them all,” he said.
Protz is calling on the province to do more to alleviate some of the pressures front-line responders, such as firefighters, are facing, to ensure call response times do not increase.
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“It would be great if the province could come give us not more money, but staff,” he said. “Staff are always helpful, especially when we’re dealing with this.”
During question period Monday, Lori Carr, minister of mental health and addictions, thanked firefighters and other first responders, also pointing to her government’s recovery-oriented plan.
“It’s getting them into a recovery space so that they can live safe, healthy lives in recovery, and that’s what we will stay focused on.
“We are focused on providing a recovery-oriented system of care for those individuals,” Carr said. “What that means is actually not using drugs, it’s getting them into a recovery space so that they can live safe, healthy lives in recovery and that’s what we will stay focused on.”
In a statement to Global News, Saskatoon’s fire chief confirmed the department is seeing an increase in overdose-related calls, responding to 301 calls so far this year.
“The Saskatoon Fire Department is closely monitoring the additional pressure these calls place on service capacity and remains strongly focused on staff well‑being,” said fire chief Doug Wegren.
The fire department has received 810 overdose calls so far this year, fewer than at this time last year, when the city received 991, according to the fire department.
Saskatoon police say it is still too early for them to comment on whether there has been an increase in demand for their services since PHR closed its doors.
However, other front-line community organizations are noticing the pinch.
“We’re seeing agencies that don’t normally manage this group of clients being forced to switch their service delivery models and focus entirely on emergency response to overdose,” said Colleen Christopherson-Cote, coordinator with Saskatoon Poverty Reduction Partnership (SPRP).
Christopherson-Cote said a spike in overdose numbers is typical in the spring, but that the closure of PHR is adding pressure to the situation, resulting in numbers two to three times higher than normal.
“There just is no capacity to absorb that number of people that would normally have provision of service at Prairie Harm,” Christopherson-Cote said, adding that the agencies represented by SPRP should typically start planning for the winter season at this time, but are now scrambling for summer.
Christopherson-Cote is calling on all levels of government to address the crisis at hand before it worsens in the coming weeks.
“We need a preventative mechanism so that folks who are on the edge of potentially overdosing are prevented from overdosing and are provided medical services and supports and managed so they don’t turn into an escalated EMS ambulance call and end up in a hospital.”
PHR’s board fired its executive director, Kayla DeMong, in late March, citing a significant financial shortfall and asked for donations at the time.
The board said the shortfall resulted from a 300-per cent increase in demand for services, and that they did not suspect theft or fraud, but rather made the move to avoid turning people away.
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