Safety Over Statistics, and a Question of Who Benefits

There is a particular irony in a city deciding it cannot safely count the people it is trying to help—a decision that reveals more about the state of a community than any statistic could capture. In Saskatoon, the annual Point-in-Time Count, a volunteer-driven effort to estimate the number of people experiencing homelessness, was scheduled for Tuesday. Approximately 250 volunteers had been trained. The city had prepared. And then, on Friday afternoon, it announced that the in-person portion of the count would not proceed, citing "safety concerns related to potential protest activity" that could affect volunteers, staff, and community partners .

The decision did not emerge in isolation. It followed weeks of tension around a west-side encampment occupied by more than 100 people, where the fire department had warned it planned to remove occupants. That removal was paused after protests from residents and supporters, and advocates filed a court application for an injunction—an application a judge ultimately rejected . In that context, the city's decision to cancel the unsheltered count was not simply a logistical adjustment. It was a recognition that the act of counting people living outdoors had become entangled with a broader conflict about whether they should be there at all.

For the city, the reasoning is straightforward. "The safety of volunteers, community partners, staff and people experiencing homelessness must come first," said Lesley Anderson, the city's director of planning and development . The city will still gather data from emergency shelters, transitional housing, and other systems, and will work with the fire department to estimate the number of people living in encampments . But the 2026 count will not include information collected directly from unsheltered people—the qualitative data that comes from interviews and surveys, the kind of information that cannot be inferred from a distance .

For advocates, the cancellation is being read differently. David Fineday, who lives in the encampment, described the framing as "a kick in the head." "It's giving these people a negative message," he said. "It's not a protest, we're not marching anywhere, we're standing up here for our rights" . His objection is not merely about the count itself but about what the count represents: a city studying a population it has not yet housed. "Why are they studying us?" he asked. "Maybe instead of doing a PiT count and spending a quarter of Saskatoon's budget on the police, maybe they should spend that much on affordable housing" .

The numbers from last year's count offer a context for the current dispute. In October 2025, Saskatoon identified 1,931 people experiencing homelessness . Whether that figure has risen or fallen in the intervening year is now less certain, because the 2026 count will not capture the unsheltered population through direct contact. The city has said a more comprehensive version, including a full enumeration and survey, is planned for 2027 .

The decision reflects a tension that extends beyond Saskatoon: how to measure a crisis when the act of measurement itself has become contested. The city has chosen safety over completeness. Advocates have chosen to question whether the measurement was ever the point. And the people living in the encampment, whose stories the count was designed to record, remain uncounted—not because they are invisible, but because the city decided that looking directly at them had become too difficult.

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Sources: City of Saskatoon, CBC News, Radio-Canada, CTV News Vancouver Island, Yahoo News Canada