The Cowichan Valley Regional District is, once again, looking for another location for a regional emergency weather shelter for the coming winter.
At its meeting on May 14, the board directed staff to begin searching for a new site for the shelter immediately, and report back to the board on the progress of finding one at their meeting on July 23.
Repeated attempts by local emergency organizations and local governments over the past several years to find a suitable location have proven unsuccessful.
The CVRD announced in the fall of 2024 that it had approved a plan from Emergency Management Cowichan to lease the parking lot of the closed Ramada Inn for the service last winter after an emergency weather shelter that was set up at the Cowichan Community Centre the previous winter led to many complaints from the public.
But the site at the Ramada parking lot was not considered ideal and the plan is to find a new site for next winter.
A staff report from John Elzinga, the CVRD’s general manager of community services, indicated that the shelter was open for 103 nights last winter, with 1,772 visits, with many of those visits being repeat clientele.
It cost more than $810,000 to provide the service last winter, but all but $19,533 of that cost is reimbursable through the province.
Elzinga pointed out that with increasing numbers of unhoused people in Cowichan, the increased numbers of emergency weather response nights and clients served, and with increasing unrecoverable costs, the emergency management model is becoming unsustainable.
He also pointed out that the workload of Emergency Management Cowichan is overburdened, and the requirements of dealing with an emergency weather shelter in the winter months is too much for EMC’s staff.
“This delayed progress on other tasks in the EMC work plan, including developing regional emergency operations procedure manuals, public engagement projects, and emergency asset management projects,” he said.
CAO Danielle Miles Wilson added at the meeting that the CVRD’s emergency-management program also has to respond to floods and fires and other emergencies and can’t be expected to do everything.
“We can do it all if we had the resources, but we don’t,” she said.
“We need help, we need partnership from our local government partners to solve this problem and that’s why we’re here.”
Elzinga said many of the unhoused population in the Cowichan Valley that require the services of an emergency weather shelter are centred in North Cowichan and the City of Duncan so, as acquiring funding for shelters from BC Housing is becoming more favourable for municipalities than regional districts, Duncan and North Cowichan should take on more of a leadership role in setting them up and operating them.
But the mayors of Duncan and North Cowichan disagreed.
Duncan Mayor Michelle Staples said all the partners in the CVRD have been working together to deal with the issue and she’s surprised by the recommendation that Duncan and North Cowichan should take on more responsibility for emergency shelters.
She said the municipalities also don’t have the resources to do that, and pointed out the difficulties in the past of finding a location to set up an emergency weather shelter.
Staples said she thinks it has to stay a regional issue because, while Duncan and North Cowichan may have many unhoused people that need the service, there is also need for shelters in the smaller communities in the CVRD.
“I agree that it’s underfunded, but it’s underfunded everywhere,” she said.
“North Cowichan and Duncan bear the burden of this issue and we’re being blamed for everything that happens in this region around this issue, but we are way over maxed out on this as well,” she said
“I think this would be a step backward.”
North Cowichan Mayor Rob Douglas said North Cowichan and Duncan are dealing with the impacts of homelessness and the opioid crisis on a day-to-day basis.
“We figure [North Cowichan is] spending about $15,000 a day managing these issues and, while maybe for the City of Vancouver that isn’t a lot, for a municipality of under 35,000, it’s a big impact on our finances and on our taxpayers,” he said.
“We simply don’t have the capacity or the resources to take on the role of leading this process in terms of finding a winter warming shelter. I do take staff’s point about the EMC and this being viewed as being beyond the scope of what they’ve outlined in their work plan, but I I think this is a regional issue.”
Douglas added that while most of the more than 600 unhoused people currently in the Cowichan Valley are located in the core areas of Duncan, North Cowichan and Cowichan Tribes lands, many of them come from all corners of the CVRD.
“I think if we take a more regional approach in addressing this, we’re going to be a lot more successful because it will allow us to pull together our resources,” he said.
