Saskatoon Ex parade cancelled but it's not clear why

An iconic Saskatoon parade isn’t going ahead this year and there are conflicting reasons about the reason why.

The parade organizers say the cancellation is because downtown construction is interrupting its route.

Susan Kuzma, manager of signature events at Prairieland, says organizers “exhausted all options” to make the parade happen.

“There's extensive road construction along our regular route. We proposed a couple of other options as well and there just simply was not anything that was going to work,” Kuzma tells CTV News.

But the city of Saskatoon says that’s not true.

It says the reason the parade isn’t going ahead is because organizers missed the Jan. 1 application deadline.

Had the city known about the parade plans, it says it would adjust the downtown construction schedule.

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“The city did not receive notice or a parade application from the Ex. This is required so construction and detours can be planned,” the city’s construction and design department wrote in a statement emailed to CTV News.

Kuzma said organizers began sending “some of our applications back in February.”

She said they never submitted a final application because they couldn’t get past the first step of finding a route.

“We never got past the route. We weren’t able to find a suitable route that was going to work,” Kuzma says.

The city says it only found out about the parade in April — through an advertisement on the Ex website.

Still, the city says it tried to work with the Ex to find a new route or host the parade on a different day.

“The city was awaiting a reply from the Ex parade organizers ... we had not heard anything from the Ex until we became aware of the parade cancellation in the news media,” according to the city statement.

Kuzma says the city’s proposed alternate routes weren’t ideal, and it’s looking ahead to next year.

“We’ll bring it back bigger and better next year. We'll start working with the city in January if we need to,” Kuzma says.

The city says it’s still willing to work with the Ex to make this year’s parade happen