Local MP rails against supportive housing in Vernon, Mayor and Councillor disagree

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“Once we’ve housed the street entrenched, or those looking rough, we look up and, miraculously, there is a whole new crop of them somehow, requiring yet another building costing millions of dollars to house.”

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Local MP rails against supportive housing in Vernon, Mayor and Councillor disagree

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He went on to say that “warehousing people in wet houses without a realistic path to recovery is not compassion, it’s abandonment,” and also called supportive housing policies “harm postponement ” as he claimed it was not addressing the underlying cause of addiction or addressing community and public safety.

“[Supportive housing does] nothing to help the addicted population recover, nothing for people who need mental health help, and they actively harm the surrounding community,” Anderson concluded.

A Vernon City Councillor pushed back against the MP’s claims.

“I’m not going to debate the pros and cons of harm reduction, but overdose rates are down in B.C. since 2023, and we continue to see them decline, and homelessness rates in Vernon have dropped by over 100 [people] since the last census” Kelly Fehr stated.

“So to say that strategies aren’t working at all, I don’t know if that would be accurate.”

The Mayor also opposed the claims raised by Anderson regarding how these housing types led to decreased public safety.

“Last council meeting we had a great presentation from the RCMP, where we were looking at new facilities, and [the statistics] indicated that our crime rates have been fairly flat over the last decade, and our population has been growing,” Victor Cumming stated.

“So the actual crime rate per person is actually falling.”

Fehr also asked what the Conservative Party of Canada would do to help mid-sized communities like Vernon build more housing, but Anderson refused to answer that saying “I am not here as a Conservative MP, I am here as an MP. When I said my piece about [supportive] housing that was an observation not tied to a political party, I’m not speaking for the Conservatives.” 

Speaking with Vernon Matters following the meeting, Cumming again stated the city was in favour of having supportive housing in the community.

“We have found supportive housing to be quite effective,” Cumming said.

“It’s operated by independent providers, housing is a provincial mandate, but it has been quite successful for Vernon and our view is that additional supportive housing has done two things: it’s given people a place to stay, it’s also given them a lot of programming support, which the MP indicated is not there but we all know it is. So we disagree very strongly on that point.”

The Mayor added there had been numerous cases of people who had been through the supportive housing process “had exited it in much better condition and had moved on to other levels of housing.”

Anderson recently had posted on social media about a film directed by B.C. Conservative MLA, Aaron Dunn, about the harms of the toxic drug crisis in the province, and also shared opinion pieces opposing of supportive housing.

Anderson stated during his delegation to council that he hoped to see supportive housing be a key issue for discussion during the October municipal election.