Saskatoon bar owner advocating for increased safety measures after Monday stabbing

A Saskatoon bar owner is advocating for increased safety measures after a stabbing near his restaurant left his staff traumatized.

Colonial Pub and Grill owner Peter Danabassis would like to see more lights installed at nearby Cumberland Park after a man stumbled into the bar around 9:15 p.m. Monday with a severe stab wound.

Danabassis isn’t pleased with whoever wrote the police media release because it said “a man was suffering from stab wounds inside a restaurant.”

“The guy came here from outside with the wounds, Danabassis said. “If anything, we saved the guy’s life. Because according to police, if he would have stayed another five or ten minutes bleeding the way he did, he would have died.”

Danabassis said it’s not the first violent incident that staff have had to react to and that preventing a man from bleeding to death has affected staff in the past.

“They’re concerned about their safety,” he said. “They’re concerned about the ability to work in a comfortable environment around them without having to worry about being attacked.”

Staff have told Danabassis that Cumberland Park has been the source of criminal activity near the bar on multiple occasions. That’s why he is preparing a letter for Saskatoon council requesting more lights be installed at the park to prevent violence at his bar before it happens.

“I think the city would be wise to put some lights there to free the place somehow of what’s going on at the park,” he said

Danabassis isn’t stopping there. He wants to see more done on a provincial level to combat violence in bars and restaurants, something he said is more of a problem now than it ever has been during his roughly 50 years of working in the service industry in Saskatoon.

“I’m going to bring it at the ministerial level that (the province) allow us, or mandate us, to have scanners so when people come in, we make sure they have no weapons like knives and guns,” Danabassis said.

While installing metal detectors would go a long way to keeping crime outside of his bar, Danabassis doesn’t want the negative publicity that goes along with them.

That’s why he wants the province to make a uniform policy or safety measure.

“People will say, ‘They have too much crime there!'” he said. “That’s not true, I have two doormen.”

“If all the bars would have (metal detectors) people would be prepared.”

Days before Monday’s stabbing, staff called police after seeing a man in the parking lot outside the bar showing off a gun.