Referendums were once common in Saskatoon
Saskatoon residents have gone 15 years without a referendum, but public policy votes were once common, Phil Tank writes.
Fifteen years ago, the fountain of direct democracy in Saskatoon dried up, marking a drastic change in how big decisions are made.
Saskatoon residents had become accustomed to directly deciding all sorts of issues, including where to build a new arena, whether to allow shopping on Sunday and even on daylight saving time.
Many issues required more than one plebiscite or referendum to settle.
Saskatoon voters last went to the polls to answer a question on Oct. 22, 2003, to decide whether a First Nations casino could be built downtown. After a divisive campaign, voters rejected the casino. Saskatoon residents have not voted on an issue since.
From 1910 through the 1970s, the public weighed in on numerous major projects, ranging from a new police headquarters to new library space to new schools or additions to existing schools, according to assistant City of Saskatoon archivist Ken Dahl.
Saskatoon even backed a resolution on proportional representation in 1936, which passed with a margin of 1,231. Here are some of the more interesting votes that took place in Saskatoon’s history:
HOLY SUNDAY
Since Saskatoon started out as a temperance colony, it should perhaps not be all that surprising that the city held votes on what was allowed on Sundays. What might surprise some, though, is how recently these votes were held.
In 1963, residents were asked to weigh in on “Sunday sport.” Dahl says it’s not clear what that meant, but it passed by a margin of 2,223 (10,285 in favour and 8,062 against).
A 1969 plebiscite rendered a final decision on whether folks could play billiards on Sunday — it passed with 10,285 in favour and 8,062 against.
In 1991, Sunday shopping was approved by referendum.
STORE WARS
Saskatoon voters cast their ballots three times in 12 years to change the complexion of shopping in the city.
In 1979, residents voted to allow shopping two nights a week and to lobby the provincial government to allow the change.
In 1988, voters were asked a series of questions on store hours; 55.5 per cent backed the idea of letting stores set their own hours from Monday to Saturday.
That same year, 60 per cent of voters opposed stores opening on Sunday. Some were concerned Sunday shopping would rip at the fabric of family life. “The way things are going, we’ll have children who never see their mother and father in a family situation because one’s working one day and one’s working another day,” Mayor Cliff Wright said in 1988.
Three years later, residents weighed in on whether stores should have the option of opening between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on Sundays. Voters backed Sunday openings 29,034 to 22,984.
TOONTOWN TIME?
Saskatoon nearly adopted its own time in a 1923 referendum, although Dahl says it’s not entirely clear what that would have meant. A proposal to adopt “Saskatoon time” — which was supposed to be distinct from Mountain Standard Time — failed by just 38 votes, 2,003 to 1,965. That marked the second vote on Saskatoon time, following a referendum two years earlier.
In 2011, the Saskatchewan Party government reneged on a promise to hold a provincewide referendum on daylight saving time, but Saskatoon had voted seven times on daylight saving time between 1920 and 1961, Dahl says.
Finally, in 1961, city council passed a bylaw that established Central Standard Time as the official time for business hours.
LONG ODDS
In 1994, city voters rejected establishing a casino combined with a trade and convention centre on the downtown block that would instead become home to a cinema complex. The first crack at a casino vote lost 64,215 to 50,935.
Nine years later, voters again went to the polls to vote on a casino as part of the 2003 election in which the city’s longest-serving mayor, Don Atchison, was first elected.
That election drew a Saskatoon municipal record 52.3 per cent of voters. Saskatoon voters again rejected a proposal to establish a casino, this time on the parking lot north of Midtown Plaza and TCU Place. The proposed First Nations casino was defeated 44,307 to 35,766; voters also rejected a more general question on expanding casino gambling 41,356 to 37,885.
Four years later, the Dakota Dunes Casino opened on Whitecap Dakota First Nation land 30 kilometres south of Saskatoon. Saskatoon voters have not voted directly on an issue since the contentious 2003 casino ballot.
ARENA-O-RAMA
Saskatoon voters made two separate decisions on replacing the aged downtown Saskatoon Arena.
The first took place in 1985. Council had voted 6-5 to build a new arena on provincial Crown land on the northern outskirts of the city and the Grant Devine provincial government offered $14 million toward construction. A group of businessmen who preferred a site closer to downtown forced a public vote by gathering 16,000 signatures.
Voters rejected by a nearly two-to-one margin the idea of building a new arena at the decommissioned A.L. Cole power-plant site, south of the present Saskatoon Farmers’ Market building.
A year later, a second vote was held, asking the people to grant approval for the city to build a publicly funded multi-purpose arena. That second plebiscite drew 57,077 votes, with 70 per cent backing the new arena.
Thirty years after Saskatchewan Place opened, city council has approved studying the possibility of a downtown replacement for the venue now known as Sasktel Centre.
NO NUKES
Three years before the end of the Cold War, Saskatoon voters backed declaring the city a nuclear weapons free zone. That resolution passed easily with 29,034 ballots in favour and 22,984 opposed.
The vote happened less than a decade after controversy over a proposed uranium refinery near Warman. Eldorado Nuclear Limited, a federal Crown corporation, opted to abandon the Warman plan in the face of public opposition; the refinery opened instead in Blind River, Ont., in 1983.
Eldorado merged with a provincial mining Crown to form publicly traded Cameco in 1988. That same year, with the proposed refinery still fresh in people’s minds, residents forced a vote. A pamphlet from the Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Campaign targeted both cruise missile testing in Saskatchewan and the uranium industry. The campaign sought to have signs posted outside the city to declare its nuclear-free status and to stop the City of Saskatoon from investing taxpayers’ money in companies involved in the uranium industry.
Today, Saskatoon is home to one of the world’s largest uranium companies, Cameco, and the Blind River refinery is the world’s largest commercial operation of its kind.