Margareta Dovgal: Vancouver fatality a tragic reminder of B.C.’s health system failures

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I live in Vancouver’s West End. Late last month, I was startled awake. I didn’t know why until I went out at 7 a.m. and saw a heavy police presence, a trail of destruction and distressed neighbours trying to piece together what had happened in our neighbourhood.

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It emerged that a Jeep had deliberately run over signs and landscaping on Comox Street before swerving toward people in the park near Bute Street. A witness from a nearby building described at least one person narrowly escaping. A senior on a mobility scooter was struck and hospitalized with serious injuries. His name was Johnny Sudds. He died on May 24. His son released a statement to neighbours describing the small shrine at the corner of Comox and Bute where Johnny’s friends have been leaving notes and flowers.

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The driver, 34-year-old Tadd Myron Bali, was stopped moments later when he rammed a Vancouver Police Department (VPD) cruiser. Two officers were injured while bravely putting themselves into harm’s way to stop his rampage from further destroying public space and posing an imminent threat to more bystanders.

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Bali faces four counts of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing bodily harm, with additional charges being prepared. Police have described Bali as having a history of extensive prior contact with law enforcement in both British Columbia and Saskatchewan. In 2022, he was reported missing in Saskatchewan.

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Those with family members suffering from severe mental illness immediately recognize what this history suggests. The details on the West End incident are still scant, but the context is all too familiar.

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On April 26, 2025, eleven people were killed at the Lapu-Lapu Day festival in South Vancouver when a man with severe mental illness drove into a crowd.

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Roughly a year apart, Vancouver has now had two high-profile vehicle incidents by men with histories of complex interactions with police and the system. In the Lapu-Lapu Day case, the perpetrator had severe mental illness. In the West End case, police described mental health and drug use as possible factors. Both men were known to police well before the incidents. The answer is not tougher policing. Police were already involved. What we actually need is upstream care that would have made the police interactions unnecessary.

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Nearly every week in various resident groups online, I see concerning accounts: just the other day, a woman in Vancouver told members of a private online community group that she had been randomly assaulted in broad daylight. She said that the crime was reported and the assailant was released by police with a trial date expected months later.

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When I lived in Gastown in 2017, and in Yaletown in 2023-2024, I couldn’t sleep with my windows open because I would routinely hear people screaming in the middle of the night. I wish I could say that never happens in the neighbourhood where I now live, but it’s still downtown Vancouver.

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Regular reminders of untreated psychosis shouldn’t be an accepted feature of living downtown. Nor should I have to grimace every time a visitor to my city asks me what the heck is up, and I struggle to explain why it is so bad and why our society has collectively failed to fix it.

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Most people with serious mental illness are neither dangerous nor violent, as the B.C. Schizophrenia Society stressed in its statement after Lapu-Lapu Day. However, the link is real. Untreated psychosis elevates risk, while treatment mitigates it.

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Our systems in B.C. and across Canada are still not set up to reliably ensure that the people who need treatment are consistently receiving it. The most difficult cases are precisely the ones most likely to slip through the cracks. These cases are a painful reality for family and loved ones, and a public discomfort for everyone who encounters them. Sometimes, untreated mental illness becomes a stranger assault. What starts as a routine systems failure, in such cases, ends up yielding violence that leaves trauma in its wake.

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The diagnosis of our fragmented and wasteful mental health model has been made repeatedly by serious Canadian scholars for two decades. Proven, evidence-based alternatives exist, including Forensic Assertive Community Treatment (FACT) teams. These intensive, multidisciplinary programs deliver co-ordinated care, following high-risk individuals across police, health, emergency services and community health programs.

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FACT teams, operating in multiple U.S. jurisdictions and in a small pilot in British Columbia’s Fraser South region, have been proven to work. A trial in Rochester, N.Y., found they significantly reduce new criminal convictions, jail time, and psychiatric hospitalizations. Cost analyses of that program found approximately $1.50 in savings for every dollar invested, driven largely by avoided emergency and justice-system costs.

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Emergency response is the other crucial piece. British Columbia’s 911 system was designed forty years ago. It is fragmented across regional districts, municipalities, E-Comm and the RCMP. Mental health crisis calls where no crime has occurred are still routed to police as the default, and there is no consistent province-wide alternative under 911 triage.

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The provincial government can consolidate 911 call-taking through legislation, reallocate the existing funding that currently flows to police as first responders for non-criminal mental health calls, and route those calls to the teams already getting better outcomes. We need to stop using police as the default emergency response for a problem that is not, in most cases, a crime, as the VPD itself has been noting for years.

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Most crucially, we need broader structural change toward solid wraparound programs that prevent policing interactions in the first place. That means supportive housing, community treatment teams that follow patients between hospital and home, and help for families struggling to provide care. Newfoundland, for example, has shown us that family supports in the form of its Paid Family Caregiving Option, which pays eligible family members to deliver home care, behavioural supports, and respite, can keep people with serious mental illness stable in their communities. It is a fiscally responsible model that pays families instead of supporting bureaucrats. When families are supported, the systems-wide costs can be massively reduced, both in terms of money and downstream interactions with police.

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Another common factor is inadequate co-ordination between jurisdictions and health care and policing systems. One solution could be an integrated tracking system that follows individuals across all their interactions with police, health care providers, emergency services and community mental health teams. That would enable timely risk assessments, co-ordinate care plans that travel with the patient (even across municipal or provincial borders), and ensure proactive intervention before crises escalate.

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We don’t know for sure whether Bali is suffering from mental illness, substance abuse issues, or both. What we do know is that many people suffering from severe mental illness on our streets have a long record of interactions with public entities that have tried and failed to get them consistent support precisely because we don’t have anything like it in place today.

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The 2025 amendments to the B.C. Mental Health Act deserve mention. They clarified protections for clinicians providing involuntary treatment to patients too ill to recognize they need care, a feature of schizophrenia and severe psychosis. The “right to refuse treatment” is the right to deteriorate on a sidewalk, to be arrested, to cycle through emergency rooms, or to die alone. Other provinces have walked back their involuntary treatment powers under activist pressure. B.C. has held the line. It’s a lever we can’t afford to lose, but it’s not the full picture either.

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The men who carried out the last two vehicle incidents in my city were both known to the systems meant to identify and mitigate exactly the potential risks they posed. The structural failures that emergency responders, health care professionals and normal residents see every day in cities like Vancouver can be remedied.

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It shouldn’t take another preventable loss of innocent lives for our leadership to find the political will to bridge known gaps in mental health treatment and violence prevention. We don’t need any more reminders: we need a commitment to real structural reform.

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National Post

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Margareta Dovgal is a public policy analyst and commentator.

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