Funding needed for warming centres in Nanaimo

BC Housing says funding for daytime warming centres is the city’s responsibility

Risebridge’s Mid-Island Community Connection Centre operated a warming centre  last winter, but without funding, director Jovanne Johnson says it will be impossible to staff this year. Photo courtesy of Risebridge.

A presentation by the Nanaimo Systems Planning Organization (SPO) to city council’s governance and priorities committee meeting on Monday, stressed a dire need for multiple daytime warming centres in the city this winter, but noted there is no funding to operate them.

The SPO’s executive director John McCormick said the city has some soul-searching to do when it comes to funding warming centres.

“I think that no one would disagree that warming centers are very important for Nanaimo,” he said. “So the city is going to have to do some soul searching about how important this is and what they can afford to do.”

McCormick said that the city could also challenge the province to help fund warming centres, “But there's no way around the fact that we need warming centers and that there are costs associated with the operation of them that we can't avoid.”

The SPO’s report makes three recommendations; multiple warming centres spread across the city, for service agencies to align hours of operation, paid staff time in warming centres for cleaning and maintenance as well as non-emergency programming.

The SPO’s report concludes that “The lack of provincial funding for warming centre operations is a significant risk” but argues the risks to people on the street should outweigh budgetary concerns.

The SPO estimates it would cost $265,000 to run a warming centre from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. seven days a week with four staff and a capacity of 20-25 visitors. It is estimated that about 300 people would use each centre over the course of a season for a total of 4,000 visits. The report says that two to three warming centres are needed including one in north Nanaimo.

Councillor Ian Thorpe says that the funding should not come from the city.

“No funding has been identified for warming centers for the 2023-24 year,” he said at the committee meeting. “So it seems to me we're nowhere unless we can identify some funding stream. And I hope I'm not hearing the implication that city taxpayers will be the intended sole source, or source at all, for the necessary funding.”

SPO board chair, and former city councillor, Don Bonner says that the city needs to take a leadership role by funding warming centres to ensure adequate services and then apply for funding from provincial and federal governments.

“I think what the city needs to do is decide, ‘is this something that we want to take on,’ and then recoup the money later on from the province and the feds,” he said.

Bonner said that instead of relying on a patchwork of four different programs for cold weather shelters, the city could run a single program covering all the needs and then go after provincial and federal funding for it.

“That way, with a current budget that happens year after year, we can attract the people to do the job because they know though the income to pay for their wages will be there year after year,” he said.

A spokesperson for BC Housing told CHLY by email that it is the city's responsibility to fund daytime warming centres.

Jovanne Johnson, a director at Risebridge, operated a warming centre last winter at the Mid Island Community Connection Centre. She says that without consistent funding from the city it will be impossible to staff an emergency overnight shelter this year.

“Councillor Thorpe had stated that he was hoping to hear that it wasn't the suggestion that city taxpayers would be paying for a warming center this winter,” she told CHLY. “I don't see how that's not the answer. I think that's our only answer we currently have. It's the only tangible thing that, you know, we could have at our fingertips right now.”

Johnson said that if the city doesn’t fund a warming centre, taxpayers will have to pay more for the demand on expensive emergency services.

“I think the fire risk and safety risk and human death toll is going to be a heck of a lot more expensive if we don't operate these types of services this winter,” she said.

According to the SPO report, Nanaimo’s point in time count of people who are experiencing homelessness in 2023 was 514, up 20 per cent from the previous count in 2020. The report notes that this is an underestimate of Nanaimo’s homeless population.

Of the people surveyed 80 per cent said that they had “no access to shelter of any kind.”

The report says that Nanaimo’s emergency shelter capacity is about 100, but rises to 150 in the winter due to the opening of temporary emergency shelters.

The SPO’s report listed a number of possible locations across the city that could potentially be used for a warming centre, but the city’s Chief Administrative Officer Dale Lindsay, cautioned that the list of sites was not provided by the city and that the city had not reached out to property owners of those sites.

Councillor Hilary Eastmure says that the city council needs to push the province to provide adequate funding.

“We're definitely in a worse position than we were last year because we don't have any funding identified,” she said. “So I think we need to ring the alarm on this as soon as possible.”

Eastmure moved that the city council draft a statement calling out the provincial and federal governments for not providing funding this year.

“I really want us to be able to push it back and say that we need the funding to be able to do this,” she said. “We have the operators and capacity to do it. But the dollars can't come out of our budget every single year, it's just not sustainable.”

Councillor Erin Hemmens said that a statement should highlight the disparity in shelter spaces in Nanaimo compared to Vancouver.

“Compared to other communities, we have a significant number of people who are spending the night outside,” she said. “I believe we have 76 per cent of our unhoused population who don't have a place to sleep at night whereas Vancouver with a population of about 5,000 unhoused have just over 30 per cent spending the night outside so that is a significant injustice in how they're distributing the funding.”

The committee unanimously passed a recommendation that city council release a statement about the lack of funding from the province.

Funding Note: This story was produced with funding support from the Local Journalism Initiative, administered by the Community Radio Fund of Canada.