British Columbia’s housing minister opted out of visiting Kelowna’s tent city while on an Okanagan stop this week, prompting criticism from one of its residents.
“I prefer not to be a tourist of these types of situations,” B.C. Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon said Friday, when asked if he was going to go to the encampment during a ribbon cutting at Kelowna’s newest 68-unit affordable housing complex.
“I will say that the mayor and I have had four conversations in the last six months about the challenges our BC Housing staff are on the ground. We know that challenge is real. We need more shelters, we need more supportive housing.”
A woman who goes by the name Mama Kjaer is one of the growing number of people who reside in the makeshift shelters, night after night.
She says she started living there when her husband died in April 2021.
Upon hearing about Kahlon’s decision to not tour the area, she had some immediate thoughts.
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“He doesn’t have time to come and see this mess, aren’t we proud of Kelowna?” Kjaer said. “It’s sad. It’s pathetic. I think it’s (showing) a little shortcoming on his job.”
Kjaer said she’d like him to see how, when housing is not available, it affects all parts of day-to-day life.
“Even a dog is entitled to shelter, food and water and a bath,” she said.
“I think that every civil servant should come down and try and live as we do for the first month. Start out with no ID, no anything. I think it’d be a perfect training ground.
“If it doesn’t change your mind completely about how they look at us, it will give them a little compassion, anyway.”
Khalon is not without compassion for and awareness of the housing issues in B.C., he explained at the opening of the affordable housing complex that has been 20 years in the making.
Every day, he said, he wakes up and thinks about people that are in encampments.
“And that’s what drives me in the work I do. So there’s blame to go around everywhere. But in the end, the goal for us all of us has to be to get people the housing they need,” he said.
Even the project unveiled Friday shows cracks in the current system.
“This project was started in 2003,” he said. “They weren’t able to secure funding ’til now. And that just shows you how long we’ve had a lack of funding in place.”
Kahlon says relief is on the way with the recently passed Housing Supply Act, “which sets specific housing targets for B.C. communities to tackle the provincial housing crisis,” he said.
The new legislation allows the province to mandate municipalities to fast-track housing projects. However, Kelowna is not on the list of the first 10 cities to get the order, nor is any other Okanagan community.
The province plans to announce the next 10 communities that will have to meet specific housing targets towards the end of the year, but Kahlon would not comment on whether any Okanagan communities will be on that list.
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