Reeves, councillors grill Sask. Party ministers at SARM ‘Bear Pit’

The claws were out during the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities convention’s ‘Bear Pit’ session at Prairieland Park on Wednesday.

Reeves, councillors and other RM reps grilled cabinet ministers on topics including SaskPower’s wind and solar farming, deer and elk control measures, taxation rates and Indigenous reconciliation and engagement, along with questions on why there still isn’t reliable cell and Internet coverage in many rural areas.

Questions on rural physician and nurse recruitment, mental health and addictions resources and a lack of services in remote areas dominated much of the discussion.

The new $200,000 rural and northern physician recruitment incentive was touted by Premier Scott Moe as making Saskatchewan competitive with other provinces, but the premier noted there were other issues that still need to be addressed.

“We have a number of retention incentives (and) recruitment incentives that are in place for hard-to-recruit areas of our health-care system,” Moe said.

“Whether it’s a physician, a nurse practitioner (or) an RN, we are targeting those incentives to those areas where we do have challenges — challenges in recruiting someone new, or challenges in retaining folks who are already there.”

Moe said the provincial government is also working to bring on more health-care support staff who are badly needed in many parts of the province.

“We’re doing that through immigration, we’re doing that through increasing training, and we’re also doing that using incentives to retain,” Moe added.

SARM president Ray Orb said there were a lot more questions than there were answers from the provincial government during the session.

“Going through the pandemic, of course there were some rural hospitals that had their ambulance services or their emergency services closed, and we’re hearing about that,” Orb said. “We’re asking the province to put a kind of rural lens on this.”

While he said the physician recruitment initiative was a great idea, Orb noted there were other issues that need to be addressed, like making sure rural areas have reliable broadband access and adequate policing.

If those problems are solved, Orb said rural Saskatchewan would become more attractive to prospective health-care workers.

The convention continues Thursday.