Peaceful Wolverine The two off-leash dog parks on the 1500 block of High Street West have been locked since June 26. Nearly a month now. No Moose Jaw dog was harmed. The city has said so itself.
Here is the sequence.
On June 26, a dog died and several others fell ill after a visit to the small dog park. The city padlocked both parks that afternoon and closed them “until further notice.”
The dogs belonged to one person: Vanessa Forbes, a traveller from New Brunswick, passing through Moose Jaw on a cross-country road trip. Six Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, all hers. In a later emailed statement, the city said it had received no reports of any affected dogs from Moose Jaw or the surrounding area. Every affected dog in this story belonged to the same out-of-province owner.
According to her, they began to show signs of disorientation while at the dog park, so she loaded them into the car. They worsened, and she went to the nearby Moose Jaw Animal Clinic, where she informed them that her dogs had been poisoned by the water at the dog park. At no point has she wavered from that certainty.
On July 1 she opened a fundraiser. She has told reporters the bills run to roughly $12,000 CAD, and that toxicology has not come back.
On July 9, the one thing that could actually be tested came in. The Saskatchewan Health Authority’s provincial lab found all ten water samples taken from the containers at the parks met the required standards. The outdoor tap on the city’s water line met drinking-water standards too. The water was clean.
That was the moment to reopen, in my opinion. It didn’t happen. The parks are still closed, “out of an abundance of caution,” waiting on a necropsy the city does not control — it is run by the owner’s chosen testing parties, on the owner’s timeline.
So, City Hall handed a visitor passing through town an open-ended veto over a public amenity that hundreds of residents use, on the strength of a poisoning claim that no test has confirmed and that residents who were there on the same day flatly contradict.
A look through Facebook easily found someone who says her dogs were at the park at the same time, that one of them drank from the very dish everyone was calling poisoned, and that all of them were fine. Two other owners there that day report the same.
I don’t know what happened to Forbes’s dogs. By her own admission, neither does she — the toxicology isn’t back. That is the whole point.
When locals in the Moose Jaw Dog Park Facebook group started asking the obvious questions — where is the evidence, and why is someone passing through fundraising off our park — the questions were not answered. They were punished. A public post, which as far as I can tell comes from Forbes’ business page, circulated a resident’s name, phone number, and email, told everyone to “say hello,” and urged people to get in touch with her. That resident has reported the matter to police, alleging that Forbes doxxed her, sent her threatening messages, and encouraged others to go after her. The group has since gone private.
Someone driving through town lost a dog, which is genuinely sad. In response, a park used by hundreds of people and animals here has been shut for a month with no evidence of any risk to anyone. As far as anyone can reasonably tell, our parks were and are safe.
The City of Moose Jaw continues to choose one grieving stranger’s angry, impulsive, unproven story over the rest of us. Why?
Sources: City of Moose Jaw statements (June 26 and the July 9 news release), the Saskatchewan Health Authority water-testing results, CBC and Regina Leader-Post reporting, and public posts in Moose Jaw community Facebook groups.