RiversdaleReporter.ca

Welcome, friends, explorers, and weary internet travelers! This is the unofficial local newspaper for Riversdale an upcoming area of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

News on!

As the province's jails get more and more crowded and as more and more people -- mostly men -- are getting criminalized and consequently marginalized and as our property taxes continue to rise year after year, the City of Saskatoon does it again. Saskatoon City Council have voted in favour of hiring an additional 15 police officers and increasing the police budget by 3.5 million dollars.

Like the increase in our property taxes, the increase in Saskatoon's police budget has become an annual thing.

For those who like numbers, after spending more than $180,000,000 on the new police palace Saskatoon will, after the latest increase, be spending around $110,000,000 on policing in 2020. $110,000,000/the population of greater Saskatoon = $110,000,000/250,000. = 440. $440 is about what each Saskatoon citizen - woman, man, and child - is paying for Saskatoon's Police Service.

It costs $$$ to keep that plane in the sky, officers on the roadway collecting money from motorists for SGI and the provincial government, and keeping the underclass -- that hasn't managed to flee Saskatchewan yet -- pacified.

$110,000,000 could pay 3,666.6 of Saskatoon's poorest, lower middle class incomes of $30000 per year and give them a lower middle class lifestyle. These people would no longer be forced to pick food and bottles out of garbage bins or engage in prostituion. They would no longer be, relying on Friendship Inn and the foodbank, or trying to escape their reality with intoxicants. The intoxicants cause problems: motor vehicle accidents, destroyed livers and cancers, family violence, the spread of HIV, petty crime.

$110,000,000 could help fund class action lawsuits against the federal government for the harm it has caused Canada's first nations and settler people by neglecting and refusing to meet its legal obligations to first nations people living off reserve, for the tremendous period of time the federal government was neglecting and refusing to meet its legal obligations to first nations people living off reserve.

$110,000,000 could fund a lot of innovative tech entrepreneurs who would innovate and grow and develop successful businesses that could employee the people who are fleeing the province to find work and bring other people into the province to work..

Did I mentioned that Saskatchewan's prisons are already over-crowded and that Saskatchewan has one of the highest criminalization rates in the country?

Mayor Clark and Saskatoon City Councillors: next year when the police come before you again with another budget increase request, think of city taxpayers and the city's downtrodden and say "thanks but no thanks".