Saskatchewan’s stressed healthcare workers can’t fix problems when government won’t listen

Labour Day Report | Stephen Whitworth

Saskatchewan summers are usually a quiet time in politics. The same goes for organized labour. After all, working people have earned their holidays.

This summer is different, though.

There’s turmoil in the air as we head into the Labour Day long weekend. Multiple unions have members mired in dragging contract negotiations. Nurses and other healthcare workers are fighting the Saskatchewan Health Authority over late paycheques — the result of glitchy payroll software. Workers in libraries, care homes and other jobs continue to face abuse and even violence more than at any time in memory.

Meanwhile, the cost of living keeps going up but at $14/hour, Saskatchewan’s minimum wage is still Canada’s lowest. On the bright side: an Oct. 1 hike will bring that to $15 and a tie with our fellow provincial cheapskate, Alberta.

It’ll still be Canada’s worst wage, though.

With so much going on this summer, it’s no surprise Saskatchewan unions are busy.

Saskatchewan Federation of Labour president Lori Johb hears a lot of concerns from workers, both unionized and not. “Things like health care, education… affordability is a really big one,” she says.

For the last year and a half, the SFL — an umbrella organization for Saskatchewan workers representing more than 500 union locals — has encouraged feedback from Sask. workers through its Speak Up, Saskatchewan campaign, says Johb.

“It started with some engagement with not only members of our affiliates but our communities — just talking about issues that are important to them, and focusing on things that affect many people in our communities and province,” says Johb. “Things like health care, education… Affordability is a really big one.

“Like when it comes to health care, hallway medicine is just not working,” says Johb. “A great number of our members are in rural areas and smaller communities, where health care is really, really in dire straits.

“And also, you know, education over the last several months,” she adds. “Teachers, and the struggles they’ve had.

Those struggles include the bargaining impasse that led to job action and last year’s dangerously harebrained, out-of-the-blue legislation forcing teachers to ‘out’ nonbinary students to their parents without regard to the child’s safety (not to mention privacy).

Just this month, Scott Moe’s government made a surprise decree banning cellphones during class-time — without consulting, or even notifying, the teachers expected to enforce it.

“It’s very interesting times and I’ve had an opportunity to speak to a great deal of people,” says Johb. “Everywhere you go, it’s the same: something needs to change.”

Health Care In Crisis

With apologies to everyone suffering through the current cost-of-living inferno, anyone following Saskatchewan politics knows health care has long been this province’s most important — and most divisive — issue.

That makes sense for the birthplace of medicare. Not to mention a place where many still hold a grudge against the New Democratic Party government of the 1990s, which made changes that to this day are often mischaracterized as “the NDP closing rural hospitals”.

“People who work in health care look at [those claims] with a jaundiced eye. Because the hospitals weren’t technically closed,” says Barb Cape.

Cape, the president of one of this province’s larger unions, SEIU-West, says a more accurate description would be that acute care was “smooshed together” with long-term care to create integrated health facilities.

“It wasn’t just, ‘let’s go put plywood up on the windows’,” says Cape. “It was the creation of an integrated facility that served the community better.”

“Now, does it REALLY serve the community better?” asks Cape. “I think that’s up to the communities to decide. And if you talked to Craik, or if you talked to Wakaw, they’d have a different opinion than, say, Lanigan or Davidson.

“But this whole, ‘the NDP shut down hospitals’… there’s a whole lot of baggage attached to that that people need to recognize and remember. It’s not just that [they] were dismantling the health care system willy-nilly. There was purpose, and there was rationale.

“Do I like it? Good god, no,” says Cape. “I think every place should have a quality hospital and a quality long-term care facility. But we have to invest to get those things.”

To some, this might seem like dredging up ancient history (yes, the ’90s are now ancient history. Communism is dead. Kurt Cobain would be 87 if he were alive today. Deal with it). But in 2024 Saskatchewanians wait months for cancer screenings, routine surgery, diagnostic services and addiction counselling.

And let’s not even get into wait times in emergency rooms — or wait, let’s. Just this week, the provincial NDP shared a whistleblower’s photo of patient wait times that showed one person spent more than five days in a St. Paul’s Hospital emergency room.

It’s got union leaders worried their workers are getting crushed—and that it could get worse if the current government is re-elected.

It just might be time for some of that investment Cape is talking about. But there is one area the next provincial government can save money, if that’s what it wants.

“I think should the government be re-elected, we have concerns about their current path towards privatization and splitting up the current public system by using contract nurses or contract staff,” says Cape. “We want to see those privatization measures shrunk because they are financially unsustainable. And they do not, in the long term, reduce wait times.

“If the NDP comes into power, I would like to see those contracts ended as soon as is reasonably possible so we can get back to putting the investment into the public system —where it belongs,” she says.

Talking It Over

“I am very concerned about what might happen in healthcare,” says the SFL’s Johb. “I think the Provincial government has some ideas about what they can do to shake things up, and I don’t know if that’s going to be what’s best for our province and what’s best for healthcare workers.”

“What they need to do is take a look [at] how that money’s being spent,” says Johb. “And actually talk to the people doing the work.

“Everybody needs to be at that table,” says Johb. “And they all, I think, can find solutions to make healthcare service and delivery better in our province.”

When Barb Cape talks about problems in the healthcare system one gets the sense that if solutions aren’t instantly apparent, at least the agenda for discussion is.

“Look at the ladder of care. Do we [make] more investment in homecare, and then long-term care? Do we re-evaluate what is acute care? Those things have to be thoughtfully analyzed,” says Cape.

“And not by the politicians — for the love of god, they are not the experts,” she says. “We have to do this by talking to the people who provide the service — I’m talking about unions, and frontline workers.”

Johb agrees.

“Those people are not at the table now. They’re not being asked. And I think it’s time that they are,” she says.

Unhappy Workers

Along with SEIU-West and CUPE, the Saskatchewan Government and General Employees’ Union represents many healthcare workers. SGEU members work at the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency and J T Ambulance Service Inc., and in long-term care, acute care, homecare and public health within the Saskatchewan Health Authority in northeast and northern Saskatchewan.

Overburdened work environments, petty contract disputes and the government’s habit of shutting workers out of the big conversations is a big problem, says SGEU president Tracey Sauer.

So is the declining state of public services generally.

“The quality of health care is a huge, growing concern among SGEU members,” says Sauer.

“SGEU members are no different than other Saskatchewan residents who can’t find a family doctor, they’re on wait lists for surgeries, they spend hours waiting for care in emergency rooms,” she says. “In rural Saskatchewan, there’s a constant fear their local hospital will be without a doctor. They don’t have labs; they don’t have x-rays. They don’t have staffing to meet residents in rural communities’ emergency needs at times.

“They also need to go out of province now, for some diagnostic tests and some medical care,” says Sauer. “It’s diverting the services from our province.

“And there’s the worry about the cost of quality care that they or their family members deserve in long-term care,” Sauer adds.

That’s the perspective of SGEU workers as people who use the healthcare system.

Unsurprisingly, they’re not happier as people who work in it.

“SGEU members in healthcare suffer from huge workload issues, and inadequate efforts to address staff retention and recruitment,” Sauer says. “I always refer to retention and recruitment [rather than] recruitment and retention. If you don’t have happy, reliable people working there now, it’s really hard to recruit.

“You need to retain in order to attract. And that sometimes gets lost in the whole scheme of hiring and getting new workers,” she says.

Instead of building a healthcare sector people want jobs in, though, Saskatchewan has forged a stressed-out system. And it’s crushing the people who keep the wheels turning day after day.

“Our staff members are burning out,” says Sauer. “They’re concerned about being able to provide the level of care they want to provide to patients or residents. We’ve heard a lot of concerns from the Cancer Agency about workloads, as well as the health providers. They are really feeling the pinch because of the lack of retention and recruitment.

“So those situations… we can’t sustain the services that are being provided the way our members know and feel that the public deserves. And it’s getting very difficult,” says Sauer.

Heading into the fall’s election, it seems we may have reached the point where the current government’s preferred way of doing things — decrees, ultimatums, ignoring workers’ voices and overall stubbornness — just isn’t getting results for the people of Saskatchewan.

“Whoever forms the government needs to solve the crisis sooner than later, she says. “Healthcare affects everybody in this province and our members are doing the best they can, but we certainly need some help.”