Kelowna Asks Ottawa to Close Downtown Drug Site After Province Fails to Act
A major Okanagan city says years of mitigation and requests to Victoria have not fixed the public-safety fallout around one downtown health site.
Kelowna is no longer just asking the province for help. It is asking Ottawa to step in.
Castanet reported September 1 that the City of Kelowna is calling for the closure of the supervised-consumption site at Interior Health’s Outreach Urban Health Centre on Pandosy Street. Mayor Tom Dyas shared an August 26 letter to federal Health Minister Marjorie Michel asking Health Canada to deny the site’s 2027 renewal of federal authorization. The report says the letter was sent on behalf of council after council voted to approve it.
That is the accountability story. The federal exemption is Ottawa’s legal decision. But Kelowna’s complaint is aimed squarely at Victoria and Interior Health: Dyas asked the federal minister to act after what he described as a lack of timely action from the provincial government and Interior Health despite city requests that the site be closed.
The city’s numbers are stark. According to the Castanet report, Kelowna cited 3,466 RCMP calls for service tied to the site or surrounding area since it opened in 2021, along with 371 medical incidents, 24 outdoor fires attended by Kelowna Fire Department, and 420 bylaw-service calls. The letter also cites a 2023 Downtown Kelowna Association survey in which 89% of 133 responding businesses described the site’s downtown impact as “bad” or “very bad.”
Those figures do not erase the toxic-drug crisis. They underline why public health cannot be used as a shield against public accountability. The BC Coroners Service statistical reports page, last updated August 25, lists the current unregulated-drug-toxicity dashboard to June 30, 2026. The crisis remains deadly. But after years of emergency, the NDP still owes communities a system that can protect life without abandoning the people who reside, work and respond around these sites.
Kelowna says it has tried environmental design reviews, enhanced cleaning, graffiti abatement, fencing, sidewalk upgrades, removal of waste bins and coordinated enforcement. If a city spends five years mitigating one location and still feels forced to bypass the province, that is not a communications problem. It is a governance failure.
Premier David Eby’s government should answer the practical questions: what specific conditions has Interior Health imposed on this site, what measurable safety targets are being used, why did Kelowna’s requests fail to produce a provincial resolution, and what treatment capacity is being built for the Okanagan?
Harm reduction cannot mean telling neighbourhoods to absorb unlimited disorder while Victoria delays. Kelowna has put its evidence on the table. Now the NDP government should put its plan on the table too.