Chelsea Bear, a 36-year-old mother from Flying Dust First Nation, died Aug. 12 after being sent home from a rural Saskatchewan hospital while pregnant with high-risk twins, and her family’s demand for an independent investigation is the second such call this year over how the province’s health system treats First Nations patients.
Bear went to the Northwest Health Facility in Meadow Lake on Aug. 10 experiencing pain and bleeding at 36 weeks into a high-risk twin pregnancy, according to Meadow Lake Tribal Council (MLTC) leaders, as reported by Global News. She was sent home. She returned the next day as the bleeding worsened and was transferred to Saskatoon, where her placenta tore during treatment. She died of hemorrhage early on Aug. 12; one twin was stillborn, and the surviving infant, Gracie, remained in critical condition, family members said at a Saskatoon news conference on Sept. 22.
MLTC Tribal Chief Jeremy Norman told reporters that when leaders pressed the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) for answers, an official on a video call urged them to “keep quiet,” citing how hard it already is to recruit doctors to the region, according to CBC News and Yahoo News Canada. MLTC Vice-Chief Richard Derocher called that response systemic racism, and Flying Dust Chief Tyson Bear, Chelsea’s father, demanded “a thorough, independent, transparent investigation,” not an internal SHA review. Saskatchewan NDP Leader Carla Beck has echoed the call for a public inquiry with findings released to the public. The SHA has offered condolences and confirmed a patient safety review is underway, but has not said whether it will be independent or made public.
That demand is not new for Saskatchewan’s health system, and it is the part of this story the wire coverage of Bear’s death has largely left out. In January, Diane Lafond, Saskatchewan’s First Nations Health Ombudsperson, made an identical request, that any inquiry be “completely independent” and not “conducted by health officials investigating themselves,” after Trevor Dubois, a Prince Albert man being treated for a brain tumour, died following a struggle with security guards at Saskatoon’s Royal University Hospital, according to 650 CKOM. Dubois had filed a complaint with Lafond’s office months before his death.
Lafond’s office, created in 2022 as Canada’s first of its kind, had already documented the pattern MLTC is now describing. Its inaugural report, released Oct. 27, 2025 and covering July 2023 through March 2025, tallied roughly 500 complaints from First Nations people, 64 per cent involving the SHA and 29 per cent citing a lack of emergency care, including patients who waited up to 20 hours before leaving without treatment, per 650 CKOM’s report on the findings. The report also flagged hospitals using non-disclosure agreements to keep patients from speaking about their experiences, a pattern that echoes the “keep quiet” allegation MLTC leaders are now raising in Bear’s case.
Taken together, the two cases raise a question neither the SHA nor the province has answered. After roughly 550 complaint files opened since 2023, a report naming emergency-room access as the top concern, and now a second family this year demanding an outside investigation, will Saskatchewan authorize the fully independent inquiry Lafond and now Flying Dust First Nation are asking for, or will it again rely on a review the health authority conducts of itself. Bear’s mother, Debbie Bear, said she wants the answer to matter beyond her daughter’s case: “Now that my daughter’s gone and the baby, I just want things to change in hospitals.”
Via Global News, CBC News, Yahoo News Canada and 650 CKOM.
