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Photo by Michael Bell / Regina Leader-Post

“We have to use our platform to show that it doesn’t matter what colour you are or where you come from, we’re all humans. If we can do that on this platform, it can trickle down to the other people in the world.”

The same day, the Riders’ organization was distancing itself from former club president Tom Shepherd who now runs the Friends of the Riders Touchdown Lottery. Before the game in an interview Shepherd referred to Trump as “my man” and agreed with the president’s stance that players who kneel shouldn’t get paid.

Two days later, Shepherd apologized.

Race was also at the centre of a debate that sparked after Kamao Cappo, an Indigenous man, said he’d been accused of shoplifting and was forcibly removed from a Canadian Tire store in July. In September, police said no charges would be filed against the store employee, a decision Cappo at the time said “smacks of racism.”

The Ministry of Justice said there was not enough evidence to show the employee’s actions were more than an “honest defence of store property.”

Charges were filed, however, in one of the most bizarre scenes in Regina this year.

On Sept. 27, Regina police were following a man who they called a suspect in a stolen vehicle investigation when he decided to try to avoid them by climbing a tree. He spent the next five hours in that tree as officers tried to coax him down. Police even sprayed with a hose at one point, thinking he may have been trying to light his backpack on fire, but that only made the man climb higher in the tree.