Saskaboom

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

by Craille Maguire Gillies

I’d been looking for traces of Joni Mitchell all over town and finally found her in the glass-walled café at the Mendel Art Gallery. Perched along the banks of the South Saskatchewan River, the Mendel is a beacon of culture in Saskatoon. Mitchell, meanwhile, is the city’s patron saint of culture and arguably its most famous export (Gordie Howe, John Diefenbaker and Farley Mowat are from here, too). There, hung on the wall, was one of Mitchell’s famous self-portraits – as close as I would get to the Canadian icon. The musician-artist’s work was passing through as a travelling exhibition, and it made an impression. It was exactly the sort of unexpected small pleasure you’d find in Saskatoon.

If Saskatchewan is to Alberta what Canada is to the United States – modest and, some would say, a little more soulful – then Saskatoon, its biggest city, is its heart. Here you’ll find a kind of self-effacing folksiness. This is, after all, a place named after a tiny berry. A place where the 15 minutes it takes to get downtown from the airport qualifies as having been stuck in traffic. Where the University of Saskatchewan’s Huskies sports teams made an international fashion statement (and a bundle in sales) by stamping a kitschy paw-print logo on the backsides of their shorts. Where a prominent scientific institution, Canadian Light Source Inc., home to the country’s only synchrotron, has recently enlisted a popular sci-fi author as its first writer-in-residence.

But along with this quaint quirkiness is a quiet dynamism. While the economies in cities such as Edmonton and Calgary are expected to shrink, Saskatoon’s is expected to grow by a modest but nation-leading 1.7%. Thank the trickle-down from Saskatchewan’s position as Canada’s biggest exporter of oil after Alberta, and from having almost two-thirds of the Earth’s recoverable potash. As well, Cameco, one of the largest publicly traded uranium companies in the world, and PotashCorp both have their headquarters in Saskatoon. Besides that, the city has positioned itself as a science hub, building on the success of outfits like the Canadian Light Source.

This isn’t the first boom the area has seen. In the early 20th century, following some political instability stirred up by Louis Riel’s troops in Batoche, about 90 kilometres northeast of the city, Saskatoon emerged as a nexus for three intercontinental railway lines. Nicknamed Hub City, it became a major distribution centre and, in 1909, gained the provincial university. But inflated land values and overambitious land-subdivision schemes resulted. High interest rates and tight money brought a recession to Saskatoon as to all western cities, and was exacerbated by the Great War. But that was then. Today, regardless of any downturn, the city’s being dubbed Saskaboom, leading planners to anticipate a population, one day, of 400,000.

Despite this sign of rising national prominence as a business hub, don’t expect Saskatoon to lose its soulfulness. On one visit, I sat under an enormous tent on the riverfront as the sun set. Actors ran up the aisles to a low stage, enthusiastically performing a contemporary interpretation of one of the Bard’s classics during the popular annual festival, Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan (one year it featured a 1970s disco version of The Comedy of Errors). Midway through, a thunderstorm came in, the rain lightly drumming on the tent while the actors just kept going. Maybe it’s this can-do, unassuming attitude, but the city of Saskatoon won me over instantly. It took a little longer to acquire a taste for that little berry.

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