Between 2008 and 2018, use of involuntary treatment under the Mental Health Act (MHA) more than doubled from 560 to 1,140 times per year in the Northern Health region.
Province-wide use of the MHA has only increased since then. In 2008, people were forced into medical admission 10,000 times. By 2023, people experienced this an estimated 30,000 times.
This increase of people being detained, often under methods that fall into a legal grey area, where patients are not provided the majority of their rights-based paperwork, reflects reliance on a carceral system – one that is not built on evidence-based practices or lived/living experiences.
Most generously, this form of detention is sold as a quick fix to complex problems that people who are homeless and/or who use drugs are being inaccurately blamed for. Involuntary treatment creates cycles of trauma, and detention and locked cells are not part of a healing process.
Northern context
Much of the focus on involuntary apprehension and ‘treatment’ expansion in BC has been on urban areas – politicians and media pundits alike have evoked involuntary treatment as a tool to manage social disorder in BC’s cities through a process of dehumanization and displacement.
But support for the intervention is being flaunted by some politicians in the North, too.
One of the BC government’s ‘hubs’ for planned involuntary treatment expansion will be in Terrace. And Prince George city councillors recently voted to endorse the conversion of a local, inactive youth prison into a secure psychiatric hospital with the potential for an involuntary treatment unit, despite resistance to involuntary treatment expansion from community members.
In Prince George, like other regions in BC, politicians are scapegoating people who use public space as the cause of social issues and driving moral panic. At the same time, people are enduring interlocking crises of housing, a toxic drug supply, a healthcare worker shortage, and income inequality that are receiving far too little attention.
Local politicians have used dehumanization as justification for this form of violence. For example, Conservative Party MP Todd Doherty called people who use drugs “zombies” in his opening for the Mental Health and Addictions Symposium in November 2024, according to people in attendance.
This kind of language is not only stigmatizing, but revealing. Doherty, like many other politicians, is comfortable perpetuating the age-old process of dehumanization, which in turn, can help rationalize thousands of preventable deaths from drug poisoning.
Doherty has also generalized about people who face allegations of crime, repeatedly using the racist epitath “thugs,” by referring to current sentencing law as soft “hug-a-thug” approaches.

The city councillor who spearheaded the Prince George motion, Kyle Sampson, previously apologized for calling people relying on survival crime “a bunch of losers” that “don’t deserve to have any empathy or sympathy given towards them. I hope that we can…make them feel as unwelcome as possible.”
The homeless population is being scapegoated for problems facing downtown businesses in Prince George, which is fuelled in part by stories written in the Prince George Citizen. The Citizen, a local newspaper, routinely runs divisive editorials placing downtown businesses in conflict with people living outdoors.
These stories place blame on people with no housing for businesses closing down. But these same stories rarely bring attention to direct socioeconomic factors, such as consumer patterns, including higher local price points on many products, the impacts of exclusion and stigma, or the many other variables that have resulted in the downward trend that some businesses are experiencing. This heightened focus on a single and inaccurate cause drives moral panic, and has sparked calls for vigilantism on community social media pages against people living on the streets of downtown Prince George.
The Citizen is run by local business owner Cameron Stolz. Stolz is a former interim president of the BC Liberal party (now BC United), who has perpetuated dehumanization in his own columns, writing that someone who uses drugs can become an “angry and aggressive meth monster.” Constructing monsters out of meth users is a tired old trope rooted in ignorance and anti-stimulant panic.
And while politicians will code apprehension and indefinite detention in a psychiatric ward or prison as “compassionate care,” it is the same violent practice hidden under a new title.
Detention is not a fix for service gaps
Involuntary treatment will not address the underfunding of healthcare and housing infrastructure, nor the need for a regulated drug supply in the North.
While communities like Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside are regularly positioned as the epicenter of BC’s drug poisoning crisis, harm reduction interventions and community developed initiatives have made overdoses fatal less often in Vancouver when compared to other BC communities, including in the northern regions.
Involuntary treatment is not a solution to evictions of encampments or “displacement to nowhere,” unless the goal is permitting people to die. Evicted residents are put at even greater risk of harm when discharged by police into similar conditions from which they were apprehended, because apprehension and coercive displacement itself causes harm. Major studies have linked displacement to increased chances of dying from overdose.
Meanwhile, income assistance rates in BC remain as low as $635 per month, which includes a ‘shelter’ allowance for people who are homeless in BC. This makes welfare systemically unlikely to support people to climb out of poverty, all while income security programs remain a labyrinth of surveillance, regulation and punishment, rather than support.
Ultimately, no number of treatment beds can unpoison a contaminated supply chain. This is one reason the single intervention into the toxic drug crisis with the most public health benefits was the Drug User Liberation Front’s unsanctioned, community-run compassion club: it actually gave a group of people an alternative to toxic drugs.
Northern Health failure to ensure rights
In 2019, BC’s Ombudsperson released their findings on the province’s opaque involuntary treatment landscape.
Prince George’s Hospital of Northern British Columbia was identified as being a particularly bad actor when it came to administrative compliance with Mental Health Act (MHA) legislation. At the time, only 30 per cent of people forced into medical admission were provided with the appropriate rights-based forms they are entitled to, and required paperwork was only completed 13 per cent of the time.
In the Ombudsperson’s 2022 “investigative update,” Northern Health continued to score poorly on their facilities’ quality of administrative work related to involuntary treatment.
In Prince George, there are also many programs that never resumed after the height of COVID-19 regulations, including some outreach-based programs. People who are being treated in the hospital for mental illness are kept in the surgery ward. The hospital has not had a helipad since 1993 and many surgeries can only be performed in Vancouver hospitals.
Severing people from community
People in the north can face especially acute violence under the MHA.
BC’s Mental Health Act authorizes detention with no time limit, as well as forcing people onto antipsychotics indefinitely.
In the north, where facilities can be few and far between – for example, there is nearly 600 kilometres separating Prince George and Terrace – detention can mean not only apprehension to a locked unit, but complete removal from your community.
It is also something we see already with youth from around the north being sent to the psychiatric ward in Prince George.
Gendered impacts of Eby’s direction in crises context
The weaponization of psychiatry is rife with gender-specific impacts, from histories of forced sterilization to pathologizing deviance to rationalizing “invasive” treatments for women and gender-diverse people. Norms and expectations around sexuality have been used as a pretext for conversion therapies, child removal, and extending forced admissions.
Health Justice has noted that despite these long histories of differential treatments based on gender, the BC government does not measure the gendered impacts of apprehension and forced treatment under the MHA.
With the BC NDP building women-specific sites in certain regions, there is also a high likelihood that women will be targets of apprehension and separated from their communities to be sent and stranded at these sites.
Settler colonial power and racism in healthcare
While BC’s Ministry of Health apparently believes Indigenous children are targeted under the MHA compared to other youth, they have been unable to confirm this, as they do not track that type of data.
The First Nations Leadership Council has called for “treatment over detention” and for holistic data collection that aligns with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) because of this.
BC’s healthcare system – which people are forcibly admitted into under the MHA – is deeply embedded with anti-Indigenous sentiment, alongside a lack of cultural safety and/or competency.
Police officers remain authorized to detain people under the MHA using their own assessment. Yet we know that the Royal Mounted Canadian Police were founded as enforcers of settler colonization, and that the same racist logic is still embedded in Canadian law enforcement organizations, including within Prince George.
Care is not forced
Involuntary treatment – or whatever label politicians want to stick on it next – is not a solution to the real social issues that our communities are facing.
Involuntary treatment is a pitch by and for those that benefit from it: politicians campaigning on a quick fix, business and land speculators who benefit from the displacement of people who rely on public space, and law enforcement organizations who benefit by remaining involved in the management of mental health crises, even though they tend to make crisis response worse.
Involuntary treatment is already employed in BC – and it has failed our communities. With the evidence and knowledge of the harms that the intervention causes, the choice to scale it up is an act of intentional violence.
We know there are real solutions that are often ignored or quite literally criminalized under Eby’s BC NDP: peer-led crisis response initiatives, supporting networks of mutual aid and care, provision of adequate and dignified housing for all, raising income assistance rates, regulating community-run compassion clubs, and building up culturally-safe treatment that works and that people actually want to attend, not be forced into while wearing handcuffs.
Grace Burke is a social work student and community organizer in Prince George.
Tyson Singh Kelsall is a PhD candidate in SFU’s Faculty of Health Sciences, an outreach-based social worker in Vancouver, and an alumni of the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George.