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MAY 2013
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Dan Canfield, proprietor of the music
shop Village Guitar & Amp, caters to well-
heeled customers who enjoy making like
Jimmy Page on the weekends. But things
were very different when he first arrived
from Toronto, back in 2004. “I would be
driving around this depressed Saskatoon
and wonder what the heck I was doing
here,” he says. “A year later, I saw it ge ing
busier. I sensed something happening. A
year a er that, you could smell themoney
in the air. I felt as though anybody with
half a brain could come here and do some-
thing entrepreneurial.”
While Canfield certainly doesn’t mean
his comment to be snide, it still points to a
shi in a itudes here. A er all, if anybody
withhalf a brain can succeed inSaskatoon,
people who fail to do so—those who, say,
are being squeezed by rising real estate
pricesratherthanenrichedbythem—must
be deficient in some way. According to the
SaskatoonPovertyReductionPartnership,
the city has one of the worst income gaps
of any Canadian urban center.
Reminders of Saskatoon’s spiraling
affluence are everywhere you turn. One
elementary school pickup point often
looks like a luxury car dealership. A clus-
ter of chic condos is going up downtown.
There’s a surging technological park,
Innovation Place, filled with enterprises
financed by locally sourced venture
capital. In the Riversdale district, Curtis
Olson has developed The Two Twenty, a
“
co-working facility” whose tenants (an
architect, a so ware writer, a publisher, a
guy who remixes music) pick up bo les
of aged balsamic vinegar and artisanal
jewelry at Lifestyles by Darrell Bell.
Conventional wisdom states that this
kind of transformation is a good thing, a
mark of true and lasting progress. A er
all, Riversdale, home to Olson’s hip com-
mercial building, used to be so sketchy that
cabbies would refuse to go there. “Drivers
figured they would have problems here,”
says a bearded barista in the coffee shop
below the offices. “That’s changed.”
AS SASKATOON’S SKYLINE RISES,
so too does a sense of optimism. “We are
such a young city, we’re going to go up,”
says Christie Peters, a chef and co-owner
of TheHollows (and former Vancouverite).
“
I still feel like we’re at the beginning of
something. This is the best time.” Si ing in
her restaurant, Peters says this as waiters
scurry past bearing trays of oxtail ravioli
and steelhead trout, bound for a long table
loadedwithbusinessmen enjoying awine-
fueled blowout on the company card.
A few days later, 800 Saskatoon social-
ites congregate at the city’s art complex,
the Mendel Art Gallery, for an annual
fundraiser. They’re being served samplers
from The Hollows and wild-boar canapés
fromWeczeria. The affable owners of local
distilleryLuckyBastardmixginand tonics.
Abstract images flicker on one of thewalls
as a Sonic Youth–style indie rock band rips
it up onstage. The manager of Duck Duck
Goose, a young, slender guy named Aman
Saleh, watches fromthe edge of the dance
floor. “Isn’t this great?” he asks.
It
is
great, undeniably, but there’s also an
undercurrent of tensionhere. TheMendel,
it turns out, has been at the center of a
bi er dispute, one rooted in Saskatoon’s
burst of good fortune.
A few years ago the Mendel board of
trustees announced plans to expand
and, in conjunction with the city council,
decided to relocate the Mendel to ritzy
River Landing, a $93 million project that
would also include changing the name of
the 49-year-old institution to the Art Gal-
lery of Saskatchewan. Camille Mitchell,
a granddaughter of gallery founder Fred
Mendel, was furious. “By basically stealing
the paintings of the Mendel Gallery and
stripping theMendel name,” she tolda local
newspaper, “[the board] has a great way to
get more money in their pockets.”
Adding insult to Mitchell’s injury, in
2011
the city council voted to change the
name again—to the Remai Art Gallery of
Saskatchewan—as a gesture of gratitude
to the Frank and Ellen Remai Foundation.
A philanthropic venture bankrolled by
property development dollars, the Remai
Foundation is underwriting a large part of
theMendel’smove; it’s alsogiven thegallery
405
Picasso linocuts valued at $20 million.
In helping lead a movement to save the
existing gallery, Mitchell is doubtless on
somethingof aquest topreserveher family
honor, but her criticism of the project can
be seen as part of a wider conflict, too. For
all its recent gains, Saskatoon has also lost
something—its identity, perhaps, maybe
even its way—or at least this is the viewof
a small andhitherto silentminority. It took
theMendel controversy tobring things toa
head, but the traditionalistsfinally squared
offwith the progressives, and the response
ofthemajorityofSaskatoon’s residentswas
resounding. They shrugged, sipped their
designer coffee and got on with the busi-
ness of doing all right for themselves.
As for whether Saskatoon has changed
irrevocably, nobody knows. Eric Howe, an
economist at the University of Saskatch-
ewan, believes the citymay rediscover itself
sooner thananyone imagines—specifically,
at any time between now and 2019. Howe
is a believer in a kind of economic deter-
minism: As surely as night follows day, the
thinking goes, boomtimeswill be followed
by busts. “They always are,” Howe says.
“
They always are.”
MICHAEL KAPLAN
is a writer in New York
City. While in Saskatoon, he lingered in
Village Guitar & Amp longer than was
absolutely necessary.
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