Two North Bay city councillors are butting heads over the mandate and effectiveness of the city’s Community Safety and Well-Being committee. On one side, councillor Tanya Vrebosch is not holding back how she feels about it. “We didn’t want it to just focus on housing and homelessness,” said Vrebosch. “We wanted it to focus on municipal issues that were impacted by the health crisis that we’re facing.” Vrebosch sits on the committee and said she feels that, at first, discussions were spirited but insightful – but the scope quickly narrowed. “They’re doing the sunrise ceremony, they’re doing the powwows, they’re doing something else with Planet Youth. But they’re not looking at the broader picture,” she said. Established in 2022, an advisory group formed consisting of 16 community leaders from agencies like the North Bay Police Service, North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit, Canadian Mental Health Association, city council and other organizations. They would agree to meet quarterly and discuss safety and other well-being issues in the city. Vrebosch told CTV News that the committee’s intent was to gather as much as intel and present one package to the province to highlight the overall cost of dealing with social disorder. “We keep saying it’s the number one priority and we pat ourselves on the back saying that ‘Don’t worry. We’ve increased the police services budget and we’re doing these things on the side’,” she said. “But what are we really doing?” The last meeting, the committee chairperson and North Bay city councillor Gary Gardiner said was in June 2025 to approve a revised version of the Community and Safety Well-Being Plan, which was then moved forward to council and passed. Gardiner is defending the work that Brent Kalinowski, the committee’s coordinator, has done behind the scenes. “Prior to this committee, there was no security downtown, nor at the waterfront. So, we decided that we’d look at the budget, and we said, ‘Let’s add security,’” he said. “We have security, we have outreach, we have the police foot patrol. We don’t need another meeting to discuss whether we need more security. All that stuff just doesn’t happen by chance. A lot of it is legwork.” Vrebosch fired the ‘first shot’ on Wednesday afternoon. “We have a chair right now that says that there’s nothing on the agenda,” she said, referring to Gardiner. “There’s lots to talk about. Maybe that person needs to step down and give the chair up to somebody else.” Gardiner quickly retorted, saying that the committee has “done its job” and that it doesn’t matter if he resigned or not. “The comment that there’s nothing being done is not fair to Brent and all the work he’s done, nor to the advisory committee that works on behalf of all us as citizens,” Gardiner said. Vrebosch is requesting a survey where citizens can express their safety concerns in it. “It hasn’t really been the true will of this council to deal with community safety and well-being,” she said. “The mayor said the other day the number one priority for the citizens of North Bay was community safety.” There was a Community Safety and Well-Being survey completed last year as well as one in 2021. Conducted over a six-week period, the updated survey received 980 responses – down from 3,038 respondents in 2021. One of the questions in the survey was ‘Have you ever been made to feel unsafe in North Bay?’ In the first survey, 83 per cent of respondents said ‘yes.’ Last year, that number dropped to 79 per cent.
