“We are releasing dangerous patients from hospital before they are ready to go because we have to, there is nowhere else to send them." — Dr. Barb Kane, head of the psychiatry at University Hospital of Northern BC.
Conservative Prince George-Mackenzie MLA Kiel Giddens quoted Kane Tuesday in Question Period in the BC Legislature while asking the provincial government for action in the wake of Saturday’s SUV driver attack at the Filipino festival in Vancouver that left 11 people dead and seven others critically injured.
Kai-Ji Adam Lo, a 30-year-old Vancouver man with a long history of mental health issues who was known to police, has been charged with eight counts of second-degree murder with more charges pending after he drove his vehicle through the crowd at the Lapu-Lapu festival just after 8 p.m. Saturday.
It’s been seven months since Kane launched a petition calling on the government to address the critical lack of access to higher-level psychiatric care in northern BC communities which she says is putting unnecessary stress on families of mental patients, their communities, police services and hospital staff forced to deal with increased homelessness, drug use and street crime.
“There are very few short-term care beds available in Prince George, Terrace and Dawson Creek, only 45 of those in total, but if anyone in the region requires a greater level of safe and secure forensic care there are no beds at all in Northern Health,” said Giddens.
“These patients need to be transported somehow to one of only three beds in Kamloops.”
Premier Davd Eby responded by saying Dr. Danele Vigo, appointed last June as the province’s first chief scientific advisor for psychiatry, toxic drugs and concurrent disorders, has been meeting with mental health specialists at UHNBC and has consulted with Lheidli T’enneh First Nation Chief Dolleen Logan to make progress in identifying additional mental health services for the North.
“The province has historically centralized intensive mental health services, for example at Colony Farms, at Riverview (Hospital), and transported patients across the province,” said Eby. “Our goal to bring the services to the regions of the province so people can get care closer to home closer to family and support networks who are key to success upon their release.”
Kane confirmed the province is considering the Prince George Youth Custody Centre, which closed permanently in March 2024, as the site of a mental hospital and part of that process is consulting with the Lheidi T’enneh, whose land the youth jail occupies.
She said the province will have to invest money into the facility to bring it up to current building codes, but said PGYCC is ideal as a long-term treatment centre because it is already equipped with high security features, which the hospital lacks.
“There’s no decision that’s been made but I’m still optimistic it’s coming,” said Kane.
“They had construction people looking at it to see how much it would cost, but that hasn’t been decided yet. The really long-term patients and the ones that have more violence on a long-term basis are some of the patients we’re looking at sending there, so the security they have up there is one of the advantages.
“It’s not good enough at UHNBC. We do let people out we probably shouldn’t be letting out, but you can’t keep them there forever. When Riverview was around, the big mental hospital (in Coquitlam), we did keep people for a long period of time because some of the illnesses just don’t get better. And they do need long-term care.”
Kane said she’s surprised the southern half of the province has not been more vocal about the lack of a psychiatric hospital and said the problem has grown steadily worse all over the province since Riverview closed in 2012.
“Vancouver is in the same boat as we are. They don’t have anywhere to send them either, nobody does,” said Kane. “So when they get people like (Lo) they have one hospital down there that can take them for two weeks, which is not enough.
“You don’t want things like this to happen but they may help in terms of getting more of these services. It does happen here but people don’t know about it because it’s all confidential. There’s been some incidents in the North that are just not known to people because we couldn’t talk about. There’s been violence against families or other people, it’s happened from people when they get out of the hospital.”
Prince George, Terrace and Dawson Creek are the only hospital facilities in Northern Health that have psychiatric wards. UHNBC has 20 regular psychiatry beds, four locked beds and six beds designated for adolescents but Kane said usually there are more patients than that in the hospital.
Kane said while some of the more complicated cases are sent to Kamloops, Royal Inland Hospital is not equipped to handle violent patients.
“If they’re too violent they won’t take them from us,” said Kane.
“People don’t understand that psychiatric hospitals are an essential part of the healthcare system, we have to have them. Everywhere in Canada and North America reduced the size of their psychiatric hospitals and we’re one of the only ones that totally got rid of them, and everyone’s paying for it.”
Terrace, which opened a new hospital in November, currently has 10 psychiatry beds open with the capacity to expand to 20, with two in locked areas. Dawson Creek has 13 psychiatric beds, with one locked bed.
“There’s only three forensic care beds for all of Northern Health, and they’re in Kamloops, so if you’re in Terrace that’s a 12-hour trip away,” said Giddens. “People are just being let out onto the streets, they can’t get to these spaces in Kamloops, and they’re not available, they’re already full, so we do have a big problem.
“We’ve just had a horrific event that happened in Vancouver and there’s a serious history of mental health problems. We’re trying to prevent these things from happening in the first place by having proper psychiatric care. When are we going to get beyond meetings and discussions on this and get a timeline for when we’re going to have more secure psychiatric hospital beds in our region? There’s really nothing for the most violent.”
Giddens said the City of Prince George and 23 community agencies have signed Kane’s petition.The city's intergovernmental affairs committee is in Victoria this week and attended Question Period on Wednesday..
The province announced April 24 that 10 new beds will be available at a designated mental-health unit at Surrey Pretrial Services Centre for inmate of correctional facilities who require treatment. In September, the government unveiled plans to convert 20 beds into a secure housing and care facility at the Alouette Correctional Centre in Maple Ridge.
Kane’s petition to build a psychiatric hospital to serve the north has 3,721 signatures and another 1,000 people signed a paper-form petition. She says people see it as a public safety issue that needs to be addressed with immediate actions.
“Hopefully they will keep moving on it, and for us we will be in better shape if we get it,” Kane said.
She has yet to hear cost estimates of converting the youth jail but said whatever it does cost it will be money well spent. She pointed to the unfathomable grief to families and financial losses involved with the deaths attributed to the Lapu-Lapu incident, as well as the costs associated with the Achillion Restaurant explosion in downtown Prince George in September 2023 caused by vagrants stealing copper, as examples of how society pays the price for lack of adequate treatment facilities.
“All the people that have had to get their windows repaired and put bars up, all that costs money, and it’s been downloaded to the cities and individual businesses to some extent,” she said.
“It’s definitely changed things and it’s from a combination of a lack of mental health facilities and the drugs that came on the scene at the same time. It’s so complicated and I know with patients, especially when they get discharged from the hospital and have nowhere to go, if they haven’t already involved with drugs then they do get involved with drugs and that just makes it worse and they’re probably going to need more help all their lives as a result. It just makes it so much a harder to treat them.”
While fentanyl overdoes get most of the headlines because of the high number of fatalities, Kane said crystal meth (methamphetamine) is more of a problem for patients in treatment.
“It’s not killing people like the fentanyl is, but they become so impaired mentally just from that (crystal meth use) and it’s more dangerous because it makes people more psychotic,” said Kane. “The two of them are just terrible.”
