The Heritage Conservation Branch of the Saskatchewan Government is looking for feedback regarding the Heritage Property Designation Program.
Deadline for providing feedback is October 8, 2025.
Replies to the questions listed below can be directed via email to:
Krista Liggett
krista.liggett@gov.sk.ca
General questions regarding the current Heritage Property Designation Program
Are you aware of the Heritage Property Designation programs, Municipal Heritage Designation and Provincial Heritage Property Designation? Y/N.
If so, what do you think about the program as a whole?
Does the current program complement and/or support the work of your organization Y/N, if so, please explain how the work aligns and/or supports your program(s)?
What could be done to make the program more useful to you or your organization?
What could the Ministry do to improve the program?
General questions about commemorating heritage in Saskatchewan
Is the heritage property designation program a good way to recognize SK Heritage? Why or why not
If not, what would be a better way to recognize SK Heritage?
What stories/themes/topics would you like to see recognized through heritage designation (focus on Provincial Heritage Property designation)?
Are you aware of good examples of heritage designation programs in other places you would recommend we look at? If yes, let us know where and what components of the program impress you.
Thanks in advance for considering our request for information and we look forward to hearing from you. If you have any questions or would like to have a conversation, please reach out to me directly.
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Our 2025 Summer Walking Tour series has come to an end. We want to thank each and every person who attended a tour this year. Your support helps Heritage Regina continue to present engaging events and share our city’s rich heritage.
Please take a few minutes to fill out our 2025 Summer Walking Tour Survey. We want your opinion even if you did not attend any of the walking tours in 2025.
2025 Summer Walking Tour Feedback
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Thank you for completing our survey! Your feedback is much appreciated. Watch out for the launch of our 2026 Lecture Series and don’t miss Regina’s most Historic Haunt, Ghosts of the College Avenue Campus, returning this October.
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Under the direction of Heritage Regina’s Board of Directors, the Program Coordinator will lead the development and execution of Heritage Regina’s events and programming.
Responsibilities:
Coordinate and oversee Heritage Regina’s annual events and programming, including lectures, tours, and other public events.
Develop program and event workplans, timelines, and budgets in collaboration with the Board.
Coordinate all event logistics, including scheduling, venues, permits, materials, and attendee registration (as required).
Develop and maintain programming records to fulfill requirements for grant reporting and evaluation, and alignment with strategic goals and Heritage Regina’s mission.
Identify and implement effective ways to enhance public participation and attendance at programming and events.
Recruit event volunteers and oversee volunteer engagement and recognition throughout the year.
Collaborate with the Communications Coordinator on event promotion and outreach.
Establish and maintain clear, consistent lines of communication with the Board, colleagues, and volunteers.
Develop and/or implement new programming or updates to existing programming in collaboration with, and at the direction of, the Board.
Assist in compiling material for grant reporting or funding proposals, as required by the board executive.
During less busy times of the year, the Coordinator will assist with some administrative, operational, or other duties based on the direction and needs of the Board.
What You Bring:
Proven track record of successful program and event planning and execution (achieved through volunteer or professional experience)
Ability to stay organized, multi-task, and meet multiple deadlines
You are a self-starter comfortable with both independent and collaborative work
Excellent written, oral, and interpersonal skills
Strong attention to detail
An interest in heritage, local history, or community engagement
Proficiency with Microsoft Office products
Assets
Experience with volunteer coordination and/or engagement
A background in heritage, library/archival work, or research
Interest in, or experience with, supporting Reconciliation goals through public educational programming
Pay rate: $25/hour. Though hours may vary depending on the time of year, the Coordinator will work a minimum of 40 hours per month.
To apply, submit a resume and cover letter to info@heritageregina.ca by 11:59 PM (CST) on Monday September 8th, 2025. While we thank all those who apply, only those selected for an interview will be contacted.
Heritage Regina is a an equal-opportunity employer and strives to be an ally to minority groups in its work and hiring. We welcome applications from folks within Indigenous, Métis, disabled, 2SLGBTQ+, and other minority communities.
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Our friends at the Wascana Centre have produced a final draft of their 2025 Master Plan. They have opened a window for public feedback on the plan before they move to the next stage in developing the document.
From July 13th – July 27th you can read through their final draft of the 2025 Master Plan and provide feed back via their website.
To learn more about the Wascana Centre 2025 Master Plan and provide your feedback you can follow the link below to the Wascana Centre website.
Heritage Regina is seeking multiple members of our community who are passionate about heritage to join our Board of Directors for a one-year term. This is an opportunity to be part of a working board, meeting once monthly, and get involved in preserving and celebrating Regina’s heritage.
We encourage anyone interested to apply, but are are seeking nominees with the following skills/backgrounds in particular:
Policy writing and/or human resources (particularly in non-profit settings)
Indigenous knowledge
Legal
Fundraising
Marketing/public relations
Research (historical, archival, etc.)
Heritage Regina is committed to preserving the heritage and celebrating stories of all peoples in our community, and to allyship with minority groups in its work. We welcome applications from folks within Indigenous, Métis, disabled/neurodiverse, 2SLGBTQ+, and other minority communities who can bring diverse perspectives to our Board of Directors.
Fill out the form below to submit your nomination.
Heritage Regina 2025 Board of Directors Nomination Form
2025 Board of Directors Nomination Form
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Heritage Regina would like to welcome our new Communications Coordinator, Jesse White!
Jesse is a marketing and communications specialist who has worked with several non-profits and media outlets in the province on everything from traditional broadcast media to social media marketing. He is currently an instructor in the business program at Saskatchewan Polytechnic, where he teaches marketing, human resources, and digital design classes. Teaching the business leaders of tomorrow has reinvigorated Jesse’s creative spirit and desire to get back into a communications role.
Jesse spent much of the last decade expanding his education, studying media production, web design, and business at Saskatchewan Polytechnic. He is exploring options to continue his education through a master’s degree program at the University of Regina.
In addition to his communications roles, Jesse has enjoyed working in representation roles, including serving as the president of the Saskatchewan Polytechnic Students Association and the Saskatchewan Polytechnic Board of Directors.
Jesse is excited to work on helping the people of Regina rediscover the amazing heritage our city has to offer. He can be reached at communications@heritageregina.ca.
Our outgoing Communications Associate, Nathaniel, will be transitioning his role to Jesse over the next little while. Welcome, Jesse!
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This article was originally published on Substack on February 7, 2025. Heritage Regina has not contributed to, or edited, this article.
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By Lloyd Alder
North Toronto Station, renovated by Paul Oberman’s Woodcliffe, now an LCBO. Photo: Woodcliffe
I apologize to non-Canadian readers, but we are all a bit preoccupied these days.
The President of the USA has given Canada and Mexico a month’s reprieve after threatening to impose a 25% tariff on Canadian goods, but everyone in Canada is still flipped out, recognizing that existing treaties have been ripped up and our relationship has changed. The country has also changed, and many governments and individuals are rejecting American products. As Heather Mallick writes in The Star, It’s wartime. Do without. Shop locally. It’s not just me. And it’s not just food; we also have to think about buildings.
Me, Paul Oberman, and George Rust’eye
Fifteen ago, when I was President of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario, I fought heritage preservation battles with the support of the late Paul Oberman, founder of Woodcliffe and one of the best developers of heritage projects this country has seen. He told me often that his new construction projects might have 50% of the money go to labour and 50% to materials, many of which were imported, whereas a restoration might be as high as 80% labour, and most of the materials were local. His pitch was that restoration and renovation kept money and jobs in Canada.
This was before upfront or embodied carbon was on the radar, before we thought about the emissions from replacing existing buildings. Yet we regularly knock down perfectly good apartment buildings to build new ones twice the size instead of fixing what we have. To do so, we import tonnes of material- 30% of building materials used in Canada are imported from the USA, usually high-value stuff- in 2021, the US sold us US$2.61 billion worth of HVAC equipment, almost all of which went into new buildings.
In 2023, Canada imported 1,121,640 bricks from the USA, whereas Daniel Arellano of Arcana Materials can sell you rescued and restored bricks that are “approximately 79 times less than the production carbon footprint of new heritage-match bricks.” American bricks have been cheaper than new Canadian ones because of lower energy costs for firing the bricks; Daniel’s don’t need any firing.
Canadians have invented machines that can clean old mortar from 2 to 8 bricks a minute, making it cost-effective to reuse bricks.
I suggested that Meredith Moore of Ouroboros Deconstruction should look at what Miller Hull and Lord Aeck Sargent did at the Kendeda building for Georgia Tech in Atlanta; they designed a gorgeous ceiling where new lumber was alternated with recycled lumber to make Nail-Laminated Timber (NLT). It makes our new wood go farther and makes good use of the old wood.
Skanska
It was all nailed together by people from Georgia Works, a non-profit that trains and employs economically disadvantaged Atlanta residents. There are likely going to be a lot more economically disadvantaged Canadians after the tariffs kick in.
Surprisingly, Canada imports a lot of lumber from the USA, mainly hardwoods and engineered wood products. When I was at the Interior Design Show a few weeks ago, I was surprised to find that the Québecois designer and manufacturer of this furniture got his hardwoods from the USA; suitable local wood was unavailable.
Photo: Lloyd Alter, Haida Gwaii, 2015
Meanwhile, out west on Haida Gwaii, beautiful FSC-certified logs are being shipped to Japan because there is insufficient demand in Canada. Clearly, we have to make better use of the resources we have instead of shipping out raw logs.
Vik Pahwa for ERA
We certainly have the design talent needed to restore, repair and even add on to existing buildings, as ERA demonstrated recently in Toronto, fixing up my mistakes from when I renovated this building in the eighties.
What we don’t have are the trades. I sit on the National Trust for Canada’s Roundtable on Heritage Education, where at every meeting, we learn of another school that is dropping its heritage training programmes. They just haven’t been priorities for governments who like to build shiny new things. In the light of current circumstances, that might have to change.
For years, I have been preaching to anyone who would listen that preservation is climate action, that “We are no longer just trying to save the past; we’re trying to save the future.” Now, we are also trying to save the country. Some ideas:
Ban Demolition. Renovating and restoring what we have requires much less importing of materials and equipment. Toronto should immediately ban the demolition of perfectly good apartment buildings; we have lots of room to build housing if we fix the zoning.
Invest in our heritage trades. There is going to be significant unemployment, and preservation can put a lot of people to work.
Use less American stuff. Canada imports American steel ($9.45 billion worth) and drywall ($65 million worth) because we don’t make enough of it to meet domestic demand. Renovation and restoration means we will need less of it.
Use more Canadian Stuff. Add lightweight aufstockung or optoppen to the top of our existing buildings using Canadian timber.
Electrify and heatpumpify. Many eastern Canadian provinces get their natural gas from the Marcellus Shale fields in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Heat pumps make it possible to renovate our existing buildings and go carbon (and American gas) free.
Cancel the Therme spa on Toronto’s waterfront. It’s all American steel and glass and concrete, and its pro forma relies on American tourists who may not arrive.
Fix what we’ve got. Repair, restore, renovate, rebuild, and recycle first.
Many American readers think I am overreacting. One says, “It’s all about the illegal immigrants and drugs.”-it’s not; now he is complaining about banks. Another asks, “Have none of you ever done business with a New Yorker? how could you all be so damned gullible?” Perhaps we are all overreacting. However, I tend to agree with the Globe and Mail’s Tony Keller, who wrote under the headline, “For Canada, Donald Trump is the end of the world as we know it.”
Don’t get too comfortable. This is a one-month reprieve. It’s not the end of trade threats. It could be just the beginning. Mr. Trump has been clear that, as far as he’s concerned, no deal is ever settled, and agreements exist to be ripped up whenever it suits him. The trade war could restart in a few weeks. Or not. It all depends on Mr. Trump’s whims and needs.
Things have fundamentally changed, and we in Canada have to adapt and prepare. Changes to what and how we build should be high on the list.
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Demolition of Molson’s factory on Lakeshore and Bathurst in Toronto (Photo courtesy of Catherine Nasmith)
With climate change and housing shortages being two of the top issues in Canada and around the world, how does it make any sense to continue to have the virtually unfettered right to demolish buildings in Canada? Unless a building has heritage status, (less than 1 per cent do) you can obtain a demolition permit over the counter on demand anywhere in the country. The right to demolish is rooted in outmoded planned obsolescence practices that originated in the post-war building boom. A right to demolish has no place in the era of climate change. Conservation of all resources is critical to survival.
Society rationalizes demolition by saying, “the old must make way for the new.” We would never apply that rationale to the elderly or infirm. We do all we can to extend the life or people as long as possible, surely, we should do the same for our buildings.
Buildings contain irreplaceable environmental resources. In some Canadian jurisdictions, cultural heritage value or rental housing protection policies intervene between buildings and the wrecking ball. Heritage laws emerged in the 1960s and ’70s to try to keep important buildings out of the demolition stream. In the 21st century, the question of cultural value is eclipsed by the environmental dangers of demolition. It’s not only an issue of running out of landfill space to deal with the approximately 30 per cent of landfill from the construction industry, but it is also the loss of material that could, and should, be re-used, recycled, and repurposed. The best way to conserve material is to maintain our building stock where it stands. I am writing this article from home in a 100-year-old repurposed school building. Down the street an older hotel has been repurposed by the City of Toronto for social housing. Smart developers are rehabilitating office space for housing.
With every new build, our debt to the environment mounts. In the middle of a housing crisis, in Toronto’s Regent Park, buildings that could and should be rehabilitated sit boarded up, waiting for demolition and new construction to create new housing units. With a bit more imagination, we could build over and around what we have.
How is it that Canada has excellent policies on recycling small stuff like pop cans and paper but not buildings? How is it that the school boards and other institutional property owners are permitted to defer maintenance to the point that demolition and its associated waste and disruption become inevitable? The Toronto District School Board has a mounting maintenance backlog of more than 4.2 billion in 2023.
The demolition of the Bata headquarters in Toronto, designed by Parkin Associates. North York refused to designate the structure as a heritage building. (Photo courtesy of Catherine Nasmith)
Thinking is changing. The Declaration of Chaillot, passed March 2024 in France at the United Nations Environment Program’s Building and Climate Global Forum, represents a major shift in approach. Endorsed by over 70 countries, including Canada, it calls for, among other things, “prioritizing the re-use, repurposing and renovation of existing buildings and infrastructures to minimize the use of non-renewable resources, maximize energy efficiency and achieving climate neutrality, sustainability, and safety with particular focus on the lowest performing buildings.” The report cites an annual production worldwide of “100 billion tons of waste annually generated from construction, demolition, and renovation processes,” and that “most of the materials are wasted at the end-of-use phase of these processes, with about 35 per cent sent to landfills.”
There are two things our Canadian governments can do right away. The first is to introduce planning policies that prioritize building adaptation and reuse over demolition and new build, with financial incentives to match; the second is to introduce a notice period of 60 days prior to issuing a demolition permit. That nominal notice period can be easily worked into the construction planning calendar and would give municipalities a chance to ensure that all measures are taken to avoid the environmental damage of demolition.
As your grandmother said, “waste not, want not.”
Catherine Nasmith is a recently retired architect. As a heritage consultant and volunteer advocate, she specializes in the conservation of buildings from her two offices (both rehabilitated buildings) in Muskoka and Toronto.
http://heritageregina.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Heritage-Regina-Logo-Badge-Colour-1030x1030.png00Heritage Reginahttp://heritageregina.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Heritage-Regina-Logo-Badge-Colour-1030x1030.pngHeritage Regina2025-03-11 14:26:182025-03-11 14:26:18Op-Ed: It’s Time to Abolish the Right to Demolish