Former Saskatoon mayor Don Atchison is leaning into false claims and misinformation in his increasingly desperate mayoral comeback bid.
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Nobody’s talking about eating cats and dogs in the race for Saskatoon city council, but candidates are spreading a ridiculous claim about a supposedly secret plan to redevelop Confederation Mall.
The nonsense originated with former mayor and now mayoral candidate Don Atchison at a forum at the mall last week. Atchison held aloft the city’s four-year-old plan for transit villages and claimed: “They want to make this a desert area of non-shopping.”
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Atchison is referring to a proposal for transit villages in city hall’s strategy to improve bus service. The image that has been shared on social media shows the area now occupied by Confederation Mall as redeveloped into a dense urban residential area.
Atchison doubled down with a news release on Monday claiming the plan is “anti-car” and “anti-family.” And he denounced as “misleading” a Saturday news release from city hall that said definitively that the city is “not pursuing redevelopment of Confederation Mall.”
In his own news release on Monday, mayoral candidate Cary Tarasoff called the city’s news release during an election a “conflict.”
The image Atchison has been using — and which was also shared by council candidates Robert Pearce (Ward 3) and Courtney Saliken (Ward 4) in social media posts with some identical wording on Friday — is indeed in the 2020 report on transit villages.
But the candidates sharing this image neglect to mention that the image in the report is clearly identified as a “demonstration” plan and the report explicitly says it only represents “one way that development could take place.”
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Reality seems unlikely to stop Atchison, who is leaning into false claims and conspiracy theories in his increasingly desperate second comeback bid.
During a mayoral debate last month, fellow candidate Cynthia Block called out Atchison for making false claims about the city running deficits, which are expressly prohibited.
“Is there anyone on your team doing fact checking, because this could be a long evening?” Block asked of the moderator of the North Saskatoon Business Association debate last month, delivering the best line of the campaign.
But it’s utterly ludicrous to suggest city hall is either going to appropriate commercial land against the will of owners or force landowners to redevelop stores into high-density residential. That simply does not happen, in no small part because it would likely violate the law.
Any redevelopment is expected to be led by the landowners. The city’s news release also says that consultation with landowners revealed they were not ready.
As for Saliken’s question, posed on social media, asking where the consultation was: it’s right there on Page 7 of the transit villages engagement summary, which details events attended by hundreds from November of 2017 to May of 2019. These included three meetings with landowners and an event at Confederation Mall.
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You can certainly make a rational argument that city hall bureaucrats are overstepping their role by issuing a news release amid an election, but candidates should also feel at least somewhat constrained by facts.
Atchison, in particular, should know better, having spent 13 years as mayor and another nine as a city councillor. Lots of city plans never materialize.
During Atchison’s time in office, growth plans were produced and approved that included a “park bridge” over the railway tracks north of downtown and a bridge connecting 33rd Street to the east side of the South Saskatchewan River. Neither of those bridges seems likely to be built.
Many plans pitched by city hall remain aspirational or visionary, and Atchison is severely undermining his campaign by displaying an apparent failure to grasp that despite 21 years on council. And he neglected to mention this supposedly dire issue four years ago in his bumbling, failed campaign.
We’re still waiting for the downtown dome he embraced, which helped earn him the title of “Canada’s craziest mayor” from comedian Rick Mercer.
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Notably, Tarasoff and Block boycotted the mayoral forum at the mall last week. Tarasoff said he skipped it due to “potential political interference” from ward candidates. The newly formed organization that hosted the event, the West Saskatoon Business Association, includes candidates Pearce and Saliken.
Pearce is the pastor of Fairmont Baptist Church and Saliken is an official with Canada Post.
Block said her campaign will engage with west-side residents and businesses, but she declined to provide a reason for missing the debate.
Too bad Block skipped it, because the former broadcast journalist seems to be the only one interested in addressing the campaign’s rising tide of misinformation.
Phil Tank is the digital opinion editor at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
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