On May 31, 2025, Renner House, one of only two spaces offering detox services in Williams Lake, closed due to a shortage of health care workers.
“We made the decision to end our withdrawal management services,” said Brett Andrews, director of operations for Axis Family Resources in the Cariboo, Quesnel and the Northwest which ran Renner House.
Andrews said the decision was made due to ongoing staffing challenges.
“We were struggling to find healthcare workers,” he said.
When it opened in 2017, Renner House had four beds available to those wanting to voluntarily withdraw from alcohol or drugs, offering a space for people to do so safely.
Renner House was immediately operating at full capacity and generated a waitlist in its early days, reflecting the community’s need for the service. Since then, the need appears to have become even greater, and the toxic drug crisis all the more dangerous as the supply becomes increasingly poisonous.
In a June 10 regular council meeting at Williams Lake city hall, Interior Health (IH) presented statistics which demonstrated the top cause of death for individuals aged 19-39 years-old in IH in 2024 was illicit drug toxicity. It is also the second most common cause of death for those aged 40-59.
Withdrawal management services are a common step in the journey to recovery, a short-term service which can prepare those struggling with substance use to move on to treatment.
Andrews said withdrawal services continue to be needed in Williams Lake; however, they require 24-hour physician and nurse presence, which has become difficult to secure in recent years. The inability to properly staff Renner House culminated in Axis’ decision to end its contract with Interior Health, which funded the program.
Renner House was among the 3,778 publicly funded, community-based, adult and youth substance use beds across B.C. noted by the Ministry of Health in a March 2025 data snapshot.
Being publicly funded has raised confusion over the reason for its closure.
“In Williams Lake, like much of rural B.C., this government is cutting back on mental health and addictions supports rather than investing in more,” said Skeena MLA Claire Rattée during a May 15 Question Period in the Legislative Assembly. “We’ve recently learned that the government has made the decision to defund Renner House, their only bed-based recovery resource, cutting it from their already limited and dwindling service set.”
The Ministry of Health has confirmed with the Tribune that Axis Family Resources made the decision to end its contract to provide the service with IH and that the closure of Renner House was in fact not due to government funding cuts.
Rattée was among six MLAs, including Cariboo Chilcotin MLA Lorne Doerkson, grilling the NDP Cabinet on what’s being done to address public safety concerns in Williams Lake during the Question Period.
“The concern here is real,” said Doerkson in a recent interview with the Tribune. Doerkson said the damage he is seeing and hearing about in Williams Lake is the worst he’s ever seen it, and that he receives letters daily on the topics of drugs and health care.
“Our residents are frustrated.”
Doerkson, who has in multiple instances claimed Renner House was defunded, apologized for the misuse of words but wondered why his colleagues were not corrected by Health Minister Josie Osborne when making these statements during Question Period.
“If the use of the word defunded is incorrect or wrong, I apologize, but...the reality is that Renner House is closing,” he said.
Doerkson said the real question is not whether Renner House was closed due to funding cuts or staffing shortages, but why Interior Health is struggling to provide the services needed in our region.
“What is going on?” asked Doerkson. He pointed to the combined difficulties of finding medical staff to address both the toxic drug crisis alongside ER closures across the province. In Williams Lake, there were more than 10 ER closures in 2024.
Doerkson said we need to get to the bottom of why health care workers are not wanting to work with Interior Health.
In Williams Lake, there remains detox services at the hospital’s Gateway Stabilization Unit, which has five beds available with waitlists uncommon.
IH said its contingency plan in response to the Renner House closure is to offer these detox services at Gateway as it develops a long-term strategy. It also said it is expanding its Road to Recovery model of care for people struggling with addictions.
“Provincially, the Road to Recovery expansion will include the implementation of Access Central, up to 100 new substance use beds over three years and new or expanded existing outpatient services,” said the ministry in an email to the Tribune.
Access Central is a regional phone line connecting people with same-day assessments for their addictions care needs and matching them with appropriate services. At this time, people in the Williams Lake area can call 310-MHSU to be connected to local mental health and substance use services.
There are currently 400 publicly funded substance use beds in the IH region, 192 of which have opened since 2017. Detox services, the ministry said, are accessed voluntarily and will continue to operate as such.
“To be involuntarily admitted to a designated facility under the Mental Health Act (including the observation unit at Cariboo Memorial Hospital) an individual must have a mental disorder and meet all the criteria under the Act.”
Same-day treatment and care can also be accessed through the Provincial Opioid Treatment Access Line for those seeking outpatient services, and in the Interior Health region the Virtual Addictions Medicine Clinic offers medications and support to address opioid use or reduce alcohol cravings.
