BC’s Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General, Mike Farnworth, has been in Prince George since Wednesday (February 1).
Since being in town, he has had roundtable meetings with the mayor and council, over a dozen Indigenous groups, and other community leaders.
Farnworth chose Prince George as his first stop in his mandate to have these meetings with community leaders across the province.
“This is a big province,” he said, “it is not just Victoria, Vancouver, Kamloops and Kelowna.”
Some things Farnworth said he discussed in the last couple of days include mental health and addiction, treatment facilities, staffing shortages, all the way down to transportation and infrastructure.
The biggest takeaway from his trip north “is around the issue of services.”
That includes “treatment facilities, healthcare staff, dealing with challenges police are facing in terms of mental health.”
A root cause of many of these issues is staffing shortages.
“The challenge of getting people into positions, into good paying jobs, we are working hard to ensure those positions get filled,” he said.
“There is no silver bullet to be able to deal with all the challenges,” Farnworth added, saying all of these issues of healthcare, homelessness, mental health, and drug toxicity are all connected to and impact one another.
He will be back to work in Victoria on Sunday.
Premier David Eby was in Prince George last month for the BC Natural Resources Forum, and in December he also promised Prince George City Council that he would make a trip up to address some of these issues surrounding homelessness and toxic drugs.
Farnworth said he expects there to be many more trips to the northern capital over the coming year to aid the city and try and find solutions to these issues.
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