City of Saskatoon postpones election until Friday

The Saskatoon municipal election has been postponed until Friday.

The move was made in the wake of a major snowstorm that blew into Saskatchewan on the weekend, clogging roads with snow and ice.

In Saskatoon, the majority of polls opened Monday morning, but city officials decided later in the day to close the polls at 6:30 p.m.

Two polls didn’t open at all because of the weather, while the opening of others was delayed for several hours.

The city got just over a foot of snow and many residential streets were impassable making it impossible to get to the polls.

The city feels the four day postponement will remove those barriers.

“We want to make sure the roadways are cleared. The roadways department has indicated that it will take some time to make the roads cleared enough so the streets are accessible. We don’t want to encourage people to go back out when the streets are still not in great condition. I understand there might be a little bit more snow still coming in on Wednesday so also respecting Remembrance Day, the statutory holiday on Wednesday, that will give enough time to coordinate the logistics, people and equipment in time for Friday,” Saskatoon returning officer Scott Bastion explained.

On Friday, polls are to open at 9 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. But Bastion confirmed voters won’t go to the polling station they had originally been assigned.

“What we are planning is to have five particular locations that voters can attend similar to what we had for advanced polls. On Monday, we had 65 locations to vote and many of them are schools, so again, the logistics aspect of it, to utilize all of those same locations is very complex, so we have switched to five particular locations and voters can attend to any of those five locations,” Bastion said.

Earlier Monday, the provincial government gave municipalities the option to postpone their elections because of the storm.

Centres like Regina and Moose Jaw went ahead with their original plans, but Swift Current opted to postpone its election until Thursday.

A number of candidates in the Saskatoon election asked the city to postpone the vote as the day wore on. During a 5 p.m. media conference, officials made that call.

“We have been working with the province all afternoon to ensure we were in compliance with the minister’s order, obviously an election in the city of Saskatoon is complex and has a lot of moving parts so we just wanted to make sure that all of our pieces were in compliance with that order and logistics organized,” Bastion said.

I appreciate anyone that wishes to cast a vote for me, however, citizens' safety always comes first. I hope @cityofsaskatoon consider these exceptional circumstances and take the appropriate action to ensure anyone who wants to vote can do so without risk of injury. #yxevotes

— Cary Tarasoff (@carytarasoffyxe) November 9, 2020

Voting day in #yxe. Most areas locked in. Transit not moving. People told to stay home. Yet administration can't make the decision to delay the civic election.

Inaction by this city administration illustrates the need for common sense leadership.#mark4mayor pic.twitter.com/yARTV1DlgT

— Mark Zielke (@bizmanYXE) November 9, 2020