Meth attacks? Handgun whacks? Saskatchewan health care workers are under siege
Day of Mourning | Stephen Whitworth | April 25, 2025
Imagine you’re walking to your job and you’re randomly bashed-in the back of your head with the butt of a handgun. Or you open a door at work and breathe in a cloud of billowing meth smoke, knocking you for a loop and sending you to emergency.
Both situations sound made-up. Both are real and happened in this province.
And both illustrate the fact on-the-job injuries are getting both worse and stranger in Saskatchewan.
“It was last year — a worker on her way to work in Saskatoon at 5:30, quarter to six,” says SEIU-West president Barb Cape. “She was walking from her parked car through a park and some guy biffed her on the back of the head with a gun — they assume it was a gun, because he ran away — and she was left there bleeding.”
Workplace safety isn’t a mystically enforced concept. It’s just boring rules and regulations developed over time to protect workers from dangers inherent to a particular job — say, powerful machinery that can rip flesh or crush bones, for example. Or heavy objects that can flatten workers, or hazardous chemicals that can inflict short- and long-term injury.
We expect workplaces to protect employees from slippery ice, wet floors and sketchy electrical wiring. But shielding workers from pistol whippings on the way to a shift? That’s new.
It’s the kind of thing that’s happening more often as Saskatchewan grapples with worsening social crises, from poverty to addiction to homeless to serious mental health issues — factors that in rare instances can compel sufferers to violence.
(Let’s be clear: nobody’s demonizing those wrestling with societal problems that need societal solutions here. The overwhelming majority of addicts aren’t going to hurt someone — they’re people, just like anyone, with their own stories and experiences and struggles. And we’re not yet very good at building a world that looks after them.)
The addiction crisis, and yes, it’s a health and social issue more than a criminal one, is making some Saskatchewan workplaces — hospitals, libraries, schools, care centres, even city buses — more dangerous.
“I was talking with one of our LPNs [recently],” says Cape. “She had to go to the emergency room because there was a patient smoking meth in the bathroom and she was exposed to the fumes. She was incredibly disoriented — just knocked off of her pins — but the employer said, ‘well, why did you go to emerge? Why didn’t you go home?’
“It’s not a matter that she was exposed,” says Cape. “To the employer, it was the quantum of her exposure. When people report these incidents, the response of the employer is, ‘What could you have done differently?’ Not ‘How are you? Are you okay? How can we change the workplace so this doesn’t happen to anybody else?’
It’s ‘what did you do wrong?,” says Cape. “It’s hard to see how a job culture like that makes workplaces safer.”
Something that would? More staff.
“More staff in, let’s say, an addictions treatment centre, are more hands and more eyes on the client, who may be struggling with withdrawal, or managing their addiction, or having a mental health episode related to their addiction,” says Cape. “With more hands and more eyes you can provide better outcomes for the client.
“Not having those people means [staff] are put in a position to pick between their clients — who they will pay the most attention to,” Cape says. “Workers only have one set of eyes and one set of hands. They can’t do everything, everywhere at the same time. And making the wrong patient a priority could mean you get shoved into a corner and beaten within an inch of your life by someone undergoing some pretty bad effects from addiction treatment.”
Welcome to 2025 Saskatchewan, where meth, beatings and gun-clubbings are occupational health and safety issues.
“In the health care sector, I mean, come on,” Cape says. “Every single day we hear about a traumatic incident. Incidents in health care workplaces — where the staff are predominantly female — are on the rise. And we don’t have enough staff to address a massive mental health and addictions opioid crisis.
“I’m not aware of anyone being killed in the last year and I think that’s purely by incredible luck,” Cape says.
