NIPAWIN — The Nipawin fair has been cancelled, but the Nipawin Exhibition Association is still hopeful that they will be able to hold some kind of event this fall.
“As far as summer goes, there probably won’t be anything happening, but we’re going to keep an eye on the restrictions and then see if possibly we can do something in the fall,” said Avery Ens, first vice-president of the association. “It would probably not be like the exhibition or fair as everyone knows it.”
Ens said a major factor that led to their choice of cancelling the summer event was the changing pandemic restrictions.
“Last year we thought it might be a few months but with everything [it] keeps getting drawn out and the variants coming – it was hard to even take a wild guess what the restrictions would be for July.”
Even if the July fair did happen, Ens said there would be no midway. West Coast Amusement, the B.C. based midway service that the association had been using were unable to make the trip this year.
Some possible ideas the board has discussed around a potential fall event include shows for horse, steer and livestock.
“We also have indoor exhibits as well that we were kind of playing with as far as trying to find out how to get that done,” Ens said.
The association announced the cancellation on May 20 through Facebook.
In the post, the organization stated that the health of their community members is their number one priority, and at this point there are still too many unknowns to safely put the event on.
The Nipawin Exhibition Association is continuing to look for volunteers. Interested parties can contact the association on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/nipawinex or email at nipawinex@sasktel.net.
“A lot of people are concerned about the fair, and if they want to make sure the fair keeps going feel free to volunteer, all the non-profits are very much in need of volunteers these days,” Ens said.
“Our volunteers, a lot of them tend to be in a high risk age bracket and we want to be able to keep them safe as well, and right now with everyone in various stages of not going out of their houses, really it’s hard to tell what our volunteer base is.”
