Vernon-Lumby’s choice on mental health care: Harwinder Sandhu’s record or Kevin Acton’s experience

On Tuesday night, 13 October, the Lumby Legion was full for the first all-candidates forum in Vernon-Lumby. The Lumby and District Chamber of Commerce ran it raw: no curated questions, only light moderating, and residents at the microphone for nearly three hours.¹ Late in the evening a young man stood up and described his own experience of psychosis. He asked the candidates what they would do for people’s mental health.

Harwinder Sandhu, who has represented Vernon for the BC NDP since 2020, said she had secured funding for a new psychiatric ward at Vernon Jubilee Hospital. Kevin Acton, the Conservative candidate and the mayor of Lumby, said the project had been delayed and cut back, and then he told the room about his son.¹²

His son was diagnosed with schizophrenia, he said, and the family had a hard time finding him help. In the end they found him a place to live a viable life, but not in British Columbia. It was in Alberta.¹ That exchange is the whole election in this riding, in miniature. One candidate is defending a promise. The other is describing what it is like to wait for it.

Kevin Acton

Conservative Party of BC candidate, Vernon-Lumby

Home

The Vernon-Lumby area since 1991

Lumby

Mayor since 2009; re-elected on 17 October with 75.1% of the vote (preliminary results)

Region

18 years on the Regional District of North Okanagan, a past board chair

Hospitals

Chair, North Okanagan/Columbia Shuswap Regional Hospital District

Front line

Six years a paramedic with the B.C. Ambulance Service

Business

Contractor and builder; registered massage therapist and a partner at Bloom Wellness Centre for more than 25 years

Portrait: Conservative Party of BC

01 Where Kevin Acton and Harwinder Sandhu stand on the issues Vernon-Lumby is voting on.

Both candidates have been at the riding’s forums this month, at the Lumby Legion and at Okanagan College. Here is what each has said on four of the riding’s issues, in their own words where we have them. Sandhu has a record to run on: she points to the funding for Foundry Vernon’s youth mental health services, a second urgent primary care centre in Vernon, and new student, seniors’ and supportive housing.¹³

Those are two serious records. The sections below set out which one, in our view, Vernon-Lumby should choose, and why.

02 Kevin Acton has run Lumby since 2009, and he chairs the North Okanagan’s regional hospital district.

Acton has lived in the Vernon-Lumby area since 1991. He was elected to Lumby’s council in 2008 and became mayor the next year. For 18 years he has sat on the Regional District of North Okanagan, which serves the towns and rural areas across the riding, and he has chaired its board. Today he chairs the North Okanagan/Columbia Shuswap Regional Hospital District.⁵ Before local government he worked as a contractor and builder, spent six years as a paramedic with the B.C. Ambulance Service, and for more than 25 years has been a partner in a wellness clinic as a registered massage therapist.⁵

Lumby voters re-elected him mayor on 17 October, a week before the provincial vote, by 443 votes to 147, or 75.1%. Those are preliminary results, and the official count is due by 21 October. He has said that if he wins the provincial seat, he will pay for the village’s by-election for mayor himself.⁶ In our view, the voters who know him best have just given their verdict on him.

Voters here know his name from 2024 as well. BC United chose him as its Vernon-Lumby candidate in November 2023.⁸ When that party folded its campaign, he stayed on the ballot as an Independent and took 15.4% of the vote, after the Conservatives picked another candidate. He told CBC afterwards that most of his votes “would have come from people that were right-leaning.”⁹¹⁰ This time he is the Conservative candidate, appointed on 27 September.⁷

In our view, that history is now a strength. The voters who split between two candidates in 2024 have one candidate in 2026, and he is a mayor who has been answering to this valley for seventeen years.

03 Harwinder Sandhu fought for Vernon’s psychiatric unit, and on her government’s watch it has slipped.

Credit where it is due. Before she was elected, Sandhu was a registered nurse at Vernon Jubilee Hospital, and she has made a new psychiatric unit there her cause.¹¹ On 2 February 2024, with Premier David Eby and Health Minister Adrian Dix at the hospital, the Province announced it: 44 single-occupancy rooms to replace 30 beds in two old units, a four-bed pediatric stabilization unit, construction to begin in 2026 and completion in 2029.¹² The Morning Star reported the price at more than $110 million.¹³ Sandhu said that day:

2026 was supposed to be the year construction began. It has not begun. In May, two of the hospital’s psychiatrists told The Morning Star they had been told in mid-April that, because the Province is fiscally restrained, the build would be “repaced.” They said the unit “didn’t make it into the budget this year.”¹³ The Ministry of Infrastructure confirmed the problem in writing:

The ministry said the project will move forward, and that it is “taking the necessary time to work together with Interior Health to identify a path forward.”¹³ Sandhu is right that it has not been cancelled. Asked about it this month, she said the completion date is still 2029, and then she added a caveat of her own:³

In our view, that is the honest answer, and it is the one the riding deserved to hear months ago. The unit she championed is late, its cost has grown, and her own government has slowed it down.

04 When voters asked about the unit online, Harwinder Sandhu said they were spreading misinformation.

We read the comment sections on Sandhu’s campaign posts on Facebook and Instagram and recorded every reply from her own account that the platforms showed us, 78 in all. To be clear about what we found: she replies often, and 16 of those replies answered a critic or a question with substance. Most of her posts stayed open to comments.¹⁴¹⁵ But when constituents asked about the psychiatric unit, the substance came wrapped in an accusation. A former supporter who said she had not answered was told:

Another constituent, who had asked about the unit, got a long statement that began by counting how many times she had already answered, and then said:

The fact the ministry had put in writing in May, that the project needs significantly more money than planned and will take more time, is not misinformation. It is why people were asking.¹³

Of her 78 replies, 14 brushed a critic off and 5 went further. These are her own words, in full, to people who disagreed with her:¹⁴

Quoted as written, from the replies on her Facebook posts that the platform showed us. The highlights are ours.¹⁴

On 9 of the 104 campaign posts we read, her accounts also limited who could reply. On Acton’s page we found no such limit on any of the 63 posts we read.¹⁵ In our view, a member of the Legislature can disagree with voters without telling them they need help to detoxify their minds. People who ask about a hospital they were promised are not the problem.

05 Kevin Acton says the plan for the unit will not be enough, and he speaks as a father.

At the Legion, Acton said the price of the psychiatric project had grown to $400 million and that its scope had been reduced as a result. That is his figure. The ministry has said only that the cost rose substantially, and we could not confirm the number.¹¹³ His point stands on the record either way: the unit has not been built, and his own family had to look to Alberta. On addiction, the issue the room raised first, he took the other side from Sandhu:¹

Sandhu answered the same question with “safe drug supply, it saves lives.”¹ Acton, a former paramedic, said he had been on the warming bus a couple of years ago and had seen a young man he did not think would make it through the winter.¹

On the health system itself, he pointed out that B.C. has more than 60 vice-presidents across its six health authorities, against fewer than ten executives in Alberta’s whole system. He said he has had to make hard calls as mayor, including letting people go, and that government will have to make them too.¹ On housing, two nights later at Okanagan College, he praised Vernon’s own work on density and called for a 120-day permitting act:⁴

06 Vernon-Lumby lives on its water, farms and hills, and Kevin Acton has governed that country for years.

The farms in this riding are under drought restrictions, and the candidates were asked how they would help. Sandhu pointed to $15 million to protect the Aberdeen Plateau and the Duteau watershed.⁴ Acton answered as someone who has sat at the regional table that runs the water. He said that as mayor of Lumby, on the regional district board, he had seen funding applied for to expand storage at Duteau Creek denied, and that the Province should be capturing the water that now runs off in floods:⁴

The backcountry above Lumby is sled, hunting and logging country, reached by forest roads. On that, the record is thin on both sides, and we will say so. Across 55 speaking turns in the last Parliament, Sandhu never used any of the terms we tested for road access or public land, and we found no public statement from her on access to the backcountry.¹⁶ Acton has not set out a position of his own that we could find. His party has: when the BC Snowmobile Federation asked the parties about road deactivation this month, the Conservatives answered in writing, backing “responsible backcountry access and opposing unnecessary resource road deactivations and bridge removals.” The federation says it received no official response from the BC NDP.¹⁷ In our view, sledders and hunters in this riding should ask Acton to put his name to his party’s answer. They already know that Sandhu’s party sent none.

07 Vernon-Lumby is a toss-up, and in 2024 it was decided by 476 votes.

338Canada, which turns the published polls into a projection for every riding, rates Vernon-Lumby a toss-up. Its update of 16 October puts the Conservatives at 47% and the BC NDP at 44%, each with a margin of eight points either way.¹⁸

Vernon-Lumby, projected vote

338Canada, update of 16 October 2026. Bars show the projection; the thin lines show its margin either way.¹⁸

Kevin Acton, Conservative

47%

Harwinder Sandhu, BC NDP

44%

CGChantel Gibbs, OneBC

6%

Blair Visscher, BC Green

3%

0%30%60%

Chantel Gibbs, the OneBC candidate, is projected at 6%, and Blair Visscher, the BC Green candidate, at 3%. Neither is within reach. The race is between Acton and Sandhu.¹⁸

The last result shows how close it is. In 2024 Sandhu won with 11,837 votes to 11,361 for the Conservative, Dennis Giesbrecht, a margin of 476. If 239 of her voters had chosen the Conservative instead, the seat would have changed hands. Acton, running as an Independent, took 4,266 votes that night. Together, the two candidates on the right won 15,627 votes, 56% of the count, and still lost the seat.¹⁰⁹

The region is leaning the same way. The Angus Reid Institute’s early-October survey had the Conservatives at 57% in the Interior to the BC NDP’s 36%, and Ipsos had them at 53% to 32% across the Southern Interior and North.¹⁹²⁰

In our view, in a seat this close, Kevin Acton should be Vernon-Lumby’s next member.

08 A young man at the Lumby Legion asked who would help. The answer is on the ballot on 24 October.

Elections BC’s advance voting runs from 16 to 21 October, and Final Voting Day is 24 October.²¹ The young man who stood up at the Legion asked a simple question about mental health. One candidate answered with a project that has slipped and a list of the people she says are spreading misinformation about it. The other answered as a paramedic, a mayor, the chair of the region’s hospital district and a father whose son had to leave the province to get well.¹⁵

His family had to look to Alberta for help. In our view, Vernon-Lumby should send a member who knows what that wait costs, and that is Kevin Acton.