Three ways this province can better protect its workers (or not)
Day of Mourning | Stephen Whitworth | April 25, 2025
This writer spent a lot of time earlier this year in a hospital visiting a very ill friend. Because my friend Carolyn slept a lot, I spent a lot of this time watching hospital staff — nurses, support workers, and occasionally doctors — go about their business.
I follow the news and pay attention to the ongoing tales of our province’s badly stretched health sector, and I work in media, so I had my eyes open looking for signs of that strain. And see them I did, but not the way I expected.
The thing that really surprised me was how young so many nurses were.
Now this is one scribe’s anecdotal observation so take it for what that’s worth, but to me, a disproportionately young (under 35, say) workplace suggests a thinned-out cohort of older staff. Perhaps the older workers retired or quit, or moved away? The news tells us burnout after Covid — from overwork and reckless hostility from the maliciously misinformed ‘Eff Trudeau’ segment of the public — led to a lot of health care workers quitting.
I do wonder if the weeks I spent might not have been representative of normal hospital staffing levels — senior workers could have been on vacation (this was in December and January), or I might have unknowingly been on a ‘training’ floor (although my friend spent time in three different rooms on two different floors, as well as in an emergency room bed).
Still, over dozens of hours over multiple weeks at different times of day and night and on different days of the week, I don’t think I saw a single nurse I’d have guessed was over 50. And I’m pretty sure it’s not because working in a hospital keeps people youthful looking.
If my unscientific observations are in fact worth something, they affirm what health care workers — with teachers and education workers, community workers, library staffers and bus drivers — have been warning Saskatchewan about: worsening working conditions are leading to incidents, accidents and overall demoralization that could push public services into crisis.
And that loss of experience can only make workplaces less safe.
We’ll talk about the conjunction of crises elsewhere, but for now let’s do the positive thing and consider some solutions.
If Fixes You Must See, Try These Solutions Three
Barbara Cape is the battle-hardened veteran president of SEIU-West, a union representing workers in health care, education and community organizations.
Cape is known to have an opinion or two along with decades of experience, so I asked how she would tackle the problem of Saskatchewan’s many unwelcoming and increasingly unsafe public-sector workplaces.
Cape had three suggestions. First, she says, compensation needs to reflect the job.
“Better wages”, says Cape. “We can retain the people we have and attract new people to come and work in the education and health care systems, and in community-based organizations.
I will paraphrase: ‘money talks, baloney walks’.
Number two? “Better staffing levels, says Cape. “Legislate staffing levels in those essential public-sector services.
There’s long been tension between organized labour and the Saskatchewan Party government over essential services legislation being used to undermine the collective bargaining process. There was even a kinda famous legal case about it. Cape’s view is blunt: “If we’re so goddamn essential, then how about we start treating this sector as essential?”
And finally, Cape says it’s time to follow the rules Saskatchewan actually DOES have.
“So we’ve got wages, we’ve got better staffing,” says Cape. “Let’s start enforcing the safety regulations that we have. Let’s start educating frontline workers on their rights.
“Let’s make this a priority. Don’t just develop policies that no one’s gonna read. Let’s start enforcing what we have,” she says.
And if we don’t? What then?
“The most immediate risk is that people are going to leave the system at levels that we have not seen to date. And we’ve seen some pretty massive [losses],” says Cape. “You know, people quitting, retiring, shifting to a different career. And this is gonna get even worse if we don’t put some concerted focus and attention on it.
“I think people don’t realize our public health care, our public education and our community-based organizations, they are a public good,” Cape says. “They are services of the public good. But there are lots of businesses out there, lots of corporations, who are interested in making a buck off public services.
“If we DON’T do something now — if we lose the staff that we currently have and we can’t attract new people — our public services will collapse,” says Cape.
And if that happens? “They will then be provided by someone who’s gonna make a buck off of your misery and your need,” she says.
If my friend Carolyn — a wonderful person and lifelong champion of public services — was still with us, she’d probably have said, “And that’s the biggest safety risk Saskatchewan workplaces could have.”
Amen.
