Saturday morning fire leaves only hockey arena in northern Sask. community unusable

A fire has partially destroyed a northern Saskatchewan community’s only hockey arena, according to locals.

The fire burned a hockey arena with canvas roofing in the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation of  Southend — a community that’s about 222 kilometres north of La Ronge and accessible only by gravel road, according to their website.

Kevin Morin, the Southend band councillor, estimates the fire happened early on Saturday morning, between 2 and 3 a.m.

“It’s unusable now, and I’ve been getting calls from parents, kids, they’re phoning me, everybody. [It’s] just kind of sad, and that’s all we had for the community,” said Morin.

Southend is a proud hockey community, that had just started to bring the sport back up to where it used to be, according to Morin.

“The situations that we deal with, you know, from suicide or whatever, I’m one of the fortunate ones that made it through, you know, I give credit to this beautiful game,” he said.

There was no built-in heating in the arena, and the canvas coverall doesn’t protect against the cold, so when it’s -40 C, Morin said it’s difficult to get teams to make the trek and play there. 

“It kind of died for a few years other than when we got it [the arena] done. We were starting to get the kids going again.”

“You can talk to anybody in Saskatchewan, it’s a hockey town.”

Morin said Southend built the canvas arena back in 2014 for about $1.2 million.

He said the community has a pot of money saved for a new arena that they’ve been trying to get built for years — about $7 million.

“$7 million that we had was more than enough to do what we were planning, we had the blueprints, everything was ready to go, and then all of a sudden COVID hit, then the price tripled.”

Morin said the community has been trying to raise money more from local mining companies and government, but they are still about $14 million shy of the amount they would need to build an arena that wouldn’t be canvas.

Morin said he’s hopeful the community will be able to get more money to build a better arena in the future.

For now, he said the community is pulling together to make a temporary outdoor hockey rink.

“We don’t have that much going on other than our hockey, it’s always been a hockey town.”