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A lower mainland based advocacy group for the homeless is visiting Kelowna as part of a province-wide tour. The
Alliance Against Displacement has been observing how different communities have been addressing the problem, and early impressions in Kelowna aren't very positive.
The visit comes on a day when city clean-up crews, the RCMP, and the Downtown Kelowna Association were out this morning on the 200 Block of Leon Avenue. They were cleaning-up in and around the tents and piles of belongings that have become a fixture on the sidewalks in this part of town.
"I saw the By-law officers and the RCMP opening people's tents, unzipping tents and looking in," said spokesperson Ivan Drury. "We were here last night when the RCMP did their walk-throughs and their surveillance and harassment and threats of people who are sleeping on the street." Drury sees the clean-up effort as an extension of all that. "I saw the clean-up as part of a larger policing operation," he said. "It absolutely looks like harassment to me.
Downtown Association Executive Director Mark Burley shrugs off the criticism. "Our main purpose when we're there is to clean. To keep it clean," said Burley. "It's part of an effort, a team effort that was put together by the city with us, By-law and the RCMP and it's not confrontation at all on our part."
"What I saw in the last 12 hours of being here on the Leon Strip is that Police and By-law and the ambassadors program and the clean-up crew, that this is maintaining the space as a space of control and surveillance over low-income communities," added Drury, "that they don't know what do do with."
There is one thing that both Burley and Drury agree on. We need more housing. "They're building an inadequate amount of housing," remarked Drury.
"Yeah, we need housing," Burley agreed. "We need stuff at this time of year that they can go and be warm and they can sleep." He wants to see more shelter space in the short term. "Once we get a mat program underway and we have a place for these people to go then that's at least on the road to the solution in supportive housing."
Drury said government investment in housing needs to be on a much larger scale. "They need to recognize it as a crisis and respond as such," he said.
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