(Photo from La Ronge Regional Fire Department/Facebook)

By Susan McNeil

Lawsuit

Sask. law firm considering class action suit against province over wildfire response

Jul 2, 2025 | 5:43 PM

There appears to be a lot of public interest in a potential class action lawsuit regarding the government’s response to wildfires in Saskatchewan.

Chad Eggerman, the founding partner of Procido Law which has an office in Saskatoon, said in the five days since his firm first asked for feedback on its website, the response has been high.

“It was June 27th we put something up on our website and since then, our website has almost crashed. We have thousands and thousands of hits to it. The registration for the webinar crashed as well,” said Eggerman.

The webinar is being hosted on Monday, July 7 to explore the potential for a grouped proceeding and the firm wants to hear from people who have been affected by the recent wildfires to gauge the situation. Eggerman said they’ve had to add 150 more spots to accomodate the interest.

Class actions are filed using a representative claimant for a large group of affected people. Eggerman initially thought he would have a hard time finding someone willing to take on that role.

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“But gosh, I’ve got people fighting that they want to be the representative, insisting they’ve got the better claim.”

Filing a class action claim is a large undertaking for law firms; they only get paid if they win. Their fees are a percentage of the compensation, and they take years to conclude. Eggerman explained Procido is not a large firm.

“It’s going to be quite the fight. We’re up for the fight, but it’s more what we have to do now is figure out if we want to spend the time and resources to do this with no real prospect of getting paid for that, to be honest.”

If the partners of the firm vote to go ahead, they will file to have a judge certify the class action and then proceed to trial. However, between those steps is collecting a large amount of information that details negligence on the province’s behalf, as the party responsible for wildfire response and public safety.

The dollar value of damage in Saskatchewan is still unknown but Eggerman estimates it will be in the billions of dollars.

The latest count from the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency (SPSA) shows a total of 2,129 values have been burnt by wildfires in Saskatchewan so far this season. That includes 299 homes, 125 cabins and 312 vehicles – the bulk of which come from the Denare Beach area.

“I’m just hearing about the obvious ones at East Trout Lake and Denare Beach and the houses and cabins in the outfits and camps,” Eggerman said.

Many of the stories have a recurring theme of the government ‘just not being there’, he said.

“People think that the government has a job to ensure public safety, but now people are feeling really vulnerable because they realize that the government wasn’t protecting people or property in the north at all. They weren’t even there.”

The sense of being abandoned is something Eggerman said he noticed himself and that factored into his decision to explore what could be done. His family has a cabin in Narrow Hills in the Lower Fishing Lake area. It’s located only a few hundred meters from a government firefighting base. That proximity gave him confidence the cabin would be well protected, but that wasn’t the case.

As the Shoe fire gained ground, it engulfed the firefighting base too. He said his cabin was saved by neighbours who stayed behind to fight the flames themselves.

As the wildfire situation in the north progressed, Eggerman said he monitored the situation closely and believes there were opportunities to put out the fire before it really took off, but that did not happen.

“It almost seems to me that this is just a ‘let it burn’ policy because it was clear there’s just no resources there,” he said.

He became more concerned when he heard talk about what people saw as a lack of response.

One positive result of filing a statement of claim over the damage is people being compensated for their losses. Eggerman said another could be to have the province take climate change more seriously and to plan to fight more fires in the coming years.

“Whoever the government is has to deal with the fires in the north for the future. This isn’t going to change. We’re not going back to even 1980,” Eggerman said.

SPSA president Marlo Pritchard was asked about the potential lawsuit during a press conference on Wednesday, but said he hadn’t heard about it.

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susan.mcneil@pattisonmedia.com

On BlueSky: @susanmcneil.bsky.social