It’s Friday morning at Build Up and Aaron Timoshyk has just sent today’s construction crews out to their job sites. His job as a program manager became much easier when Build Up moved its workshop from a marine tin can to an actual building.

Inside the workshop, before heading to the construction sites himself, Timoshyk takes a moment to talk about the Saskatoon civic elections.

“We live in unique times,” Timoshyk said. “I often hear about common sense solutions and going back to basics. These are not common times. We don’t need common answers. This requires a little creativity and imagination and we we just need people to be brave.”

Mayoral candidates are offering a range of ideas to voters: bigger police budgets, a task force, more shelters and fewer shelters. The politicians had their say. Here’s what people working on the front lines want from Saskatoon’s new city council and mayor.

From conviction to construction

Now in its fifth year, Build Up is a social enterprise created by Quint, a community economic development organization working in central neighborhoods. Build Up provides job training and employment to people with criminal convictions, often for serious crimes.

“It’s a wonderful way to give back to those who at one time may have harmed the community and are now helping to heal it,” Timoshyk said.

And this provides a solution to the issue of community safety.

“The best way to fight crime is to have a job. You give people jobs,” Timoshyk said.

“You can create community safety by giving people the opportunity to enjoy some personal prosperity…They can provide for themselves, their families and their communities, because fundamentally we don’t believe that crime is a choice, but a result.”

Build Up teams work on abandoned properties in central neighborhoods, renovate Quint’s housing stock and carry out any small jobs assigned to them. They do everything except electricity and plumbing.

And it works, according to Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy case study at the University of Saskatchewan. By putting people to work and keeping them out of prison, the study found that Build Up saves money on the costs of incarceration and policing and prevents crime because that the participants do not reoffend.

One worker said he has spent his life in prison, but this past year with Build Up is the first year he hasn’t been arrested since he was a teenager. Another worker said Build Up stabilized her life and helped her regain custody of her children.

Timoshyk said people often ask why they help people with criminal records.

“The reality is that almost everyone who has committed a crime has been a victim themselves at some point in their life, often as a child,” Timoshyk said.

“So we’re working with people to help them get to a position where now when they’re raising their kids, their kids are growing up in healthier environments. It’s a multi-generational effort.”

Helping hand in the street

It’s Thursday evening and SAGE Clan Patrol volunteers are pulling three donation carts – food, winter clothing, essentials like tampons and socks – to distribute around St. Paul’s in Saskatoon, in the Pleasant Hill neighborhood.

They haven’t walked more than three blocks in half an hour and supplies are dwindling. Volunteers ask everyone they see if they need anything. Some are teenagers walking home, others camp in dark corners next to buildings. No one refuses the group’s offer.

The 2022 point-in-time homeless count found 550 unhoused people in Saskatoon, and unofficial numbers from this fall’s count suggest an increase of at least 50 per cent in the number of people without permanent shelter.

The Saskatoon Fire Department counted 932 unhoused encampments between Jan. 1 and Sept. 15 of this year. There were 1,020 in all of 2023, double the number from the previous year.

SAGE volunteers handed out half the soup and sandwiches, along with naloxone kits and socks, before arriving at the location where they know demand will be high.

“If it gets too many people too fast, we can always turn back,” a veteran volunteer said as the group walked down the alley behind Prairie Harm Reduction.

WATCH | Mayoral candidates agree that the Fairhaven shelter was a bad decision, but differ on the path forward:

Mayoral candidates agree Fairhaven shelter was a bad decision, but differ on path forward

All three candidates at the Saskatoon Morning mayoral debate Friday agreed that creating an emergency shelter in the Fairhaven neighborhood was not the right decision, but their arguments about what to do at place differed.

Dozens of people meet up, alone or in small groups.

A crowd forms around the carts and people ask for what they need: a blanket, a sweater, a few bottles of water, sandwiches. Soon all that’s left are a few bottles of water and a pair of thin gloves.

Sidney Searle is a first time volunteer with SAGE and lives in Riversdale. She said community safety is about getting involved at the grassroots level and treating everyone with dignity.

“People are afraid to have shelters in their community, but I don’t know why,” Searle said. “People are already on the streets anyway. The difference is between people who have housing in the community or those who are on the streets.”

Whose safety is a concern?

At the CLASSIC office on West 20th Street, the province’s only community legal clinic, Chantelle Johnson points out a glaring omission in civic election conversations about safety and crime.

“Many members of our community feel like no one cares about them,” said Johnson, CLASSIC’s longtime executive director.

“I think what’s often missing in discussions about safety is talking about the safety of people who are forced to live on the streets or who have no choice but to live on the streets. They are arguably the least secure people in our society.”

Johnson said politicians view shelters and increased police budgets as a solution rather than a symptom of complex social problems.

“There is no way for you to get out of the problems directly associated with poverty, mental health and addiction,” Johnson said.

“And so, even though people often want a very simple answer to complex problems, simply maintaining order is not going to make us feel safer… We hear a lot of rhetoric and grandiose statements, but it lack of real explicit plans.”

Calls to police have increased 4.5 per cent so far this year compared to 2023, according to a Saskatoon police report earlier this year. Officers are responding to more situations involving weapons and receiving more “social disturbance” calls, which involve intoxication and disturbances that are not necessarily criminal.

The Saskatoon census metropolitan area reported a 5 per cent increase in crime rates, according to the 2023 Crime Severity Index, which measures the volume and types of crime in cities. This is a slower increase than the previous year, but twice the increase in rates recorded in 2021.

Police also reported a 2.2 percent increase in property crimes in 2023. While break-ins were down about 10 percent year over year, shoplifting jumped 69 percent.

Johnson said not all issues affecting community safety – encampments, access to affordable housing, addictions and mental health – can be solved by municipalities alone. The problems and solutions affect all levels of government. Johnson hopes Saskatoon’s new city council will quickly learn to work with its provincial and federal counterparts.

“Many of the issues facing Saskatoon and our experience at CLASSIC are directly linked to social policy at the provincial level. What we would like to hear is discussions about working with the provincial government and building relationships to try to solve some of these issues together.