Blood on the Sidewalk
Kelowna’s War on the Poor Is Fueling a Deadly Overdose Crisis
In the last days of March 2025, the City of Kelowna deployed its bylaw officers and police force to carry out a coordinated and violent assault to dismantle Tent City. They tore down tarps, destroyed tents, and displaced dozens under the banner of ‘public safety.’
Days later, people began dying.
In April, 18 people died in Kelowna due to unregulated drug toxicity — triple the monthly average and the deadliest month on record in 2025. This wasn’t just a tragic coincidence. It was a direct, predictable consequence of a violent state policy. And it’s part of a much larger war: the war on the poor and people who use drugs.
From January to August 2025, Kelowna recorded 66 overdose deaths — with a fatal spike in April, immediately after the decampment.
”Street Safety” Kills — The Data Proves It
Kelowna’s decampment wasn’t about safety; it was about optics. This followed a provincial pattern, part of a now standard playbook: remove visible poverty, criminalize survival, then call it community improvement and public safety.
But here’s what actually happens when people are pushed from their communities:
overdose risk doubles, access to health and housing services plummets and violent victimization increases.
A 2023 cohort study in Vancouver found that nearly 24% of unhoused people who use drugs experienced sweeps involving confiscation of personal items, which was associated with nearly a 2x increase in overdose risk, an inability to access healthcare, and a significantly higher exposure to police violence.
Kelowna’s tent city wasn’t perfect, but it was the city’s own creation — the only space where people without housing were told they could legally exist. It was a living system of care, of peer accountability, and overdose response. It was a fragile network in the face of a lethal supply. Then, with the same bureaucratic indifference that made it necessary, the city destroyed it, erasing the last remnants of sanctioned survival. Kelowna’s spike is not unique. It’s a symptom of a broader sickness — colonial, capitalist austerity, dressed up as ‘civic improvement.’
Looking Ahead: 2025 Projections
If current trends continue, Kelowna is projected to see 99 overdose deaths in 2025 — equivalent to a staggering 66 deaths per 100,000 people. Vancouver, long portrayed as the heart of the crisis, is on track for 411 deaths, or 62 per 100,000. Despite Vancouver’s larger population and higher total count, Kelowna’s per capita overdose mortality rate would be worse.
This isn’t just statistics — it’s indictment. Smaller cities like Kelowna, stripped of access to services and starved of harm reduction, have become breeding grounds for death, all while funding for police and bylaw officers increases by the millions.
Policing the Crisis Away?
Kelowna now operates the largest RCMP municipal detachment in Canada - 251 officers in 2025 — up from just 165 a decade ago. Bylaw enforcement has also grown, reinforcing an enforcement-first strategy that prioritizes punishment over care. Meanwhile, harm-reduction infrastructure has been gutted. In the past year alone, three outreach programs — two of them peer-led — were cut. This retreat from care, paired with aggressive enforcement, has only deepened the crisis.
Between 2014 and 2025, Kelowna’s policing budget tripled — from $25.1 million to $76.7 million. As police funding has surged, so has the drug toxicity death toll. This is not public safety. It’s structural abandonment.
Correlation Isn’t Coincidence — It’s Causation
Mayor Tom Dyas continues to claim that “public safety” is Kelowna’s top concern. But the disorder he condemns is manufactured by the city itself — by evictions, by sweeps, by trauma. While residents are indeed right to feel that downtown has become more chaotic, it’s the city’s own enforcement-led strategy that has contributed to the chaos. The events that have occurred after the violent March decampment reveal a clear and deadly pattern. When you displace people, destroy their belongings, and dismantle the fragile web of community and care that exists in encampments, you don’t reduce harm — you produce death. This isn’t unfortunate correlation. It’s causation, borne out by public health research and lived reality. Until Kelowna stops treating poverty as a policing problem, the chaos will only grow.
Safety does not come from policing- it comes from housing, harm reduction, and from a safe and regulated drug supply.
Solidarity with the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF)
As this article is being written, the co-founders of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), are standing trial for providing regulated, tested heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine to save lives in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Their model, the first of it’s kind — a compassion club and fulfillment center — offered a non-medicalized, low-barrier safer supply model that operated between August 2022 and October 2023. Their charges under section 5(2) of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) come not in spite of their work, but because of it.
Their constitutional challenge argues that criminalizing safer supply violates Section 7 (Life, Liberty, Security of the Person) and Section 15 (Equality Before the Law) of the Charter. This case will shape the future of harm reduction in Canada. DULF’s actions should be recognized as a public health intervention — not criminal conduct.
The overdose crisis is not a policy failure — it is policy. It is governance through neglect, punishment, and displacement. Kelowna’s crisis is not an anomaly; it’s the logical outcome of a system that manages poverty through policing then calls it care. Until we replace enforcement with solidarity and restore autonomy to those most impacted, the blood will keep running — down the sidewalks of this province and across every community that confuses order with justice.
Kelowna has blood on its sidewalks — and that blood trails directly back to city hall.
If you haven’t heard, thanks to our amazing comrades at Camas Books we were recently given a micro grant that will allow us to begin a project of creating a memorial quilt- honouring the loss of our unhoused community members and loved ones in Kelowna. In addition to skill sharing, this project will create time and space for people to share their stories, grieve together, raise consciousness about the lived realities of state violence, and build stronger bonds of trust and solidarity.
To support our project through financial or material donations reach out to us on instagram or by email.
Reminder that you can listen to our podcast from this spring w Seeds of Revolution on Spotify, Apple and YouTube.
For more information on DULF, or how to support our comrades in the war waged on them against the state, read here.