Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon spent the weekend tut-tutting Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim’s new plan to halt construction of supportive housing, arguing the move will make the notorious Downtown Eastside neighbourhood even less safe.

“If we're saying that we're going to not support the people that are already in the community until we wait for somebody else to do something, it's just going to cause more unrest in the community,” Kahlon told the CBC.

The housing minister said he shared the mayor’s frustration that other communities in the region haven’t pulled their weight on supporting housing, “but by saying that we're not going to have supportive housing, it means more people will be homeless, more people will be sleeping in parks, and that actually is a bigger detriment to community safety than actually having housing available for them.”

It was a soft criticism from Kahlon, all things considered. He’s publicly chastised other mayors harder, for less. And that might have something to do with the NDP’s own political vulnerabilities when it comes to the lack of progress on improving conditions in the DTES.

It was only two years ago that........

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