Premier David Eby said a delegation from City of Prince George to the BC Legislature advocated for public safety enhancements in the province while speaking to the media on Thursday, May 1.
A delegation from the city’s Standing Committee on Intergovernmental Affairs had been scheduled to visit Victoria in April.
During a media conference at the Legislature on May 1, the premier was asked extensively about his government’s response to the deaths of 11 people at a Lapu-Lapu Day festivities in Vancouver after a motorist drove into a crowd.
The man accused of killing eight of those people has been said by the Vancouver Police Department to have had multiple mental health-related interactions with officers in recent months.
A reporter with Global News said there have been municipal governments across the province that have passed motions asking the province to provide a greater level of mental health and addiction supports and asked whether Eby had plans to meet with them or the Union of BC Municipalities to address chronic underfunding.
Last October, Prince George city council passed a motion calling for the province to build an involuntary psychiatric secure care facility in Northern BC.
“I was actually talking to the Union of BC Municipalities and municipal leaders,” Eby said on May 1. “The City of Prince George was just here at the Legislature. That led to significant investments around public safety in the budget.”
Those, he said, including doubling training slots for police officers at the Justice Institute of BC, special operational funding for police to tackle issues like organized shoplifting and “other quality of life crimes,” additional supports for peer teams, resources to allow nurses to accompany police to situations where people are struggling with mental health and addictions issues and new involuntary care beds in Surrey.
For those involuntary care beds, Eby said it was the advocacy of the UBCM that helped the province set them up and plan for additional ones down the line.
“Many municipalities have stepped up and said ‘we have a site, we would like you to locate beds in our community to provide this kind of care,’” the premier said. “I am grateful for that. It is that kind of co-operation between the local governments and the provincial government that is going to help us get ahead of this problem and deal with it.”
