The abrupt closure of the Cole Road encampment just off Highway 1 is being widely criticized by many members of the public and has now drawn the ire of Abbotsford South MLA Bruce Banman.
Recently, the province moved in and took away several major resources from the dozens of residents who called the rest area home, without any prior notice.
A collection of RVs and other vehicles had been a mainstay of the area for years, but they’re now being forced to go elsewhere after government workers came in and removed access to water, power, garbage bins, and bathrooms.
“The NDP didn’t give these seniors and low-income residents so much as a knock on the door,” said Banman.
“Residents now say they have no choice but to dump sewage into a fish-bearing stream because the government abruptly locked the sanitary dump without warning.”
The province has said that there was sufficient reason to shut down the encampment, citing issues such as vandalism and safety issues.
According to the Abbotsford Police Department, officers have been called to the area upwards of 70 times in 2025 for various reasons.
Banman said that if the government was going to go ahead with dismantling the encampment, then they should have given the residents a sufficient amount of time to relocate beforehand.
“You don’t just decide to shut a site down with zero notice, that’s insane behaviour,” he said.
The MLA said that he understands the need to avoid having these sorts of encampments popping up all over the place, but claimed that these sorts of makeshift communities are an inevitability given the conditions set up by the NDP government.
“I’ve warned this government that no one should be living like this, but they haven’t enforced any rules,” said Banman.
“Through misplaced compassion, they’ve allowed people to set up RVs never designed to be lived in 24/7. It’s dangerous, unsanitary, and unsafe.”
In order to prevent more situations like this from happening, Banman said that he’d like to see the province come up with a more effective housing plan that gets people off the street and out of their RVs.
A lack of affordable housing has been an issue for B.C. and the rest of the country for quite some time, resulting in a rise in unhoused people.
According to the 2025 Point-in-Time Homeless Count, Abbotsford alone has 654 homeless people.
To help combat this issue, there have been various housing projects approved in recent months, including the $72 million in federal funding that was announced in November to build 234 new rental homes in Abbotsford.
The provincial government also recommended that Abbotsford build more than 7,200 additional housing units between 2023 and 2028 in order to keep up with the housing demand as the population continues to grow.