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
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 Regina2025-06-09 02:30:452025-06-25 12:38:33Join our Board of Directors!
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!
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 Regina2025-05-23 12:30:152025-05-22 18:33:08Heritage Regina Welcomes New Communications Coordinator
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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.
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 Regina2025-03-20 13:55:482025-03-20 13:55:48Article: For Self-Sufficiency and Sustainability, We Need More Renovation and Restoration
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.
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Thank you to everyone who joined us at Government House on March 8 for Family Tree 101! Following the event, we’ve compiled a list of the genealogical resources and tips that our partner organizations showcased at the event. These are great places to help you get started with your genealogical research, or to help you figure out once your next steps are once you’ve compiled the information you’re looking for.
Their biggest piece of advice the SGS has if you’re looking into your family history? Talk to your relatives as soon as possible, if that’s an option that’s available to you. This is particularly true as some of your family members, like grandparents, grow older; they’re likely the best people to tell you about your family’s heritage.
Other websites that the SGS suggests for family history research are FamilySearch, Cyndi’s List, and Find A Grave. They also have a library and research room, located at Room 110 – 1514 11th Avenue in Regina, that is open to the public Monday-Friday from 10:00 am – 4:30 pm. The library collections include obituary, cemetery and Saskatchewan Resident Index program.
SGS also has a selection of resources available on their website, and offers research services for a fee. You can find information about this service here.
The Prairie History Room of the Library’s Central (downtown) branch contains documents about the history and peoples of what are now the three prairie provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) from pre-European contact to present day. The History Room has census records, maps, newspapers, immigration records, Indigenous and Metis genealogical records, and more. They accept yearbook donations if you’re looking to de-clutter around home without losing that part of your personal history! Central Branch staff are always happy to help with your inquiries at the Prairie History Room.
You can also access the Ancestry Library, which includes census data as well as military, immigration, and court records. This digital resource can only be accessed from library computers, at any branch. Heritage Quest is another resource with city directories, military records and more, and that can be accessed from home. Finally, MemorySask is a more recent, ongoing project that can be accessed from the library as well.
With your library card, you can access several additional resources on their website here.
The Provincial Archives has thousands of textual, photographic, and other records – so many that if stacked end-to-end, their records would stretch 3 1/2 times taller than Mount Everest!
The Archives have records like homestead records, local and family histories, pioneer questionnaires from the early 1950s, school district and teacher files, court records and more. You can also make donations of records that you may have.
They also have a webpage dedicated to family history research here. You can search their archival records online, or visit them in-person during the week and have one of their friendly archival specialists help you get started!
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 Regina2025-03-08 14:53:032025-03-08 14:55:37Getting Started With Genealogical Research
Sandra Schmirler – perhaps better known in many circles by her nickname “Schmirler the Curler” – is one of Regina’s best-known athletes. Originally born in Biggar, Saskatchewan, she went on to become one of the world’s best female curlers, leading her team as skip to win 6 provincial, 3 Canadian, and 3 world championships throughout the ‘90s before leading Team Canada to gold at the 1998 Olympic games. The win against Denmark solidified Schmirler’s place – alongside her teammates Jan Betker, Marcia Gudereit, and Joan McCusker – in history, with the medal being the first awarded for women’s curling since the sport’s last Olympic appearance in 1924.
Having earned a Bachelor’s in Physical Education from the University of Saskatchewan in 1985, Schmirler moved to Regina and began working at the city’s leisure centres, where she ultimately became the supervisor of the South East Leisure Centre. She married Shannon England in 1996, and their two daughters were born in 1997 and 1999.
Schmirler passed away at in March, 2000 after a battle with cancer at the age of just 36. Her passing was mourned across the country, with Prime Minister Chretien memorializing her “as a champion curler” and “exemplary sports ambassador”, noting her “bright, engaging personality and her incredible zest for life, qualities that were so clearly in evidence as she fought so valiantly against her illness”. In honour of Sandra, the South East Leisure Centre was renamed in her honour, as was the road leading to her team’s practice rink at the Callie Curling Club.
In honour of Women’s History Month, we honour incredible contributions of the “Queen of Curling” to sport, to recreation in Regina, and her legacy that lives on through the Sandra Schmirler Foundation.
Photo credit: Sandra Schmirler Foundation, retrieved from Discover Humbolt
Sandra Schmirler speaking at a banquet for her 1994 World Champion Women’s Curling Team. City of Regina Archives, CORA-C-1015. Lieutenant Governor Dr. Sylvia Fedoruk is in the background, herself the first woman appointed to the role.
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 Regina2025-03-07 18:24:352025-03-07 18:26:54Celebrating Women’s History Month: Sandra Schmirler
On Thursday, March 6, we were thrilled to host Dr. Nadya Foty-Oneschuk, Interim Director of the Prairie Centre for the Study of Ukrainian Heritage, for the third installment of the 2025 Winter Lecture Series “Ukrainians in Saskatchewan: An Historical Overview”. Nadya discussed the 7, often complicated waves of Ukrainian immigration to Canada, and discussed their many contributions to Canada throughout the past 130 years.
During the lecture, Dr. Foty-Oneschuk also discussed the deep bonds that exist between Canada’s Indigenous and Ukrainian communities, and mentioned an Indigenous-owned business that sells kookum scarves – symbols of solidarity and resilience – with part of the proceeds going towards aid efforts in Ukraine. You can find their website at https://indigenousgifts.ca/.
Our board president, Jackie Smith, closed out the lecture with these words: “In closing, let us hold in our hearts the Ukrainian immigrants who, through resilience and determination, became an integral part of Regina’s rich tapestry. Their journey has been one of hardship and hope, of sacrifice and success. They have built homes, communities, and traditions that continue to shape our city’s identity. As we reflect on their contributions, let us honour their legacy by preserving their stories, celebrating their culture, and standing in solidarity with those who still seek refuge and new beginnings. Their strength is our strength, their history is our history, and their future is woven into the very fabric of Regina.”
Dr. Nadya Foty-Oneschuk delivers “Ukrainians in Saskatchewan: An Historical Overview” at the Artesian on 13th, as part of Heritage Regina’s 2025 Lecture Series: Stories of Immigration.
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