Kelowna—Mission

Kelowna—Mission covers the southern and central portions of the City of Kelowna, including the downtown core, the Mission district, and the culturally vibrant neighbourhood along Bernard Avenue. The riding encompasses some of Kelowna's most desirable residential areas alongside downtown commercial strips and neighbourhoods where renters and first-time buyers were increasingly being priced out. The local economy is driven by tourism, hospitality, health care centred on Kelowna General Hospital, and the service sector, with forestry remaining a factor in the broader regional economy.

The seat had been held by the BC Liberals since 2001, and was considered one of the party's most reliable Okanagan strongholds. The 2020 election marked a generational shift: the retiring incumbent created an open seat for the first time in over a decade. The Liberals nominated a new candidate to defend the riding, while the NDP saw an opportunity to contest territory that had previously been out of reach.

Candidates

Renee Merrifield (BC Liberal Party) — Merrifield was the founder and CEO of Troika Group, a Western Canadian real estate development company she had started in the late 1990s. She held an MBA from the University of Liverpool and had been named among WXN's Top 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada from 2017 to 2019. She was also a recipient of EY's Entrepreneur of the Year award for real estate in the Pacific region in 2015. She had lived in the Kelowna area for twenty-five years.

Krystal Smith (BC NDP) — Smith was a senior ministerial assistant with the provincial government. She had previously worked on the federal leadership campaign of NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and for Vancouver mayor Kennedy Stewart. She had also served as the BC NDP's regional representative for the Central Interior Okanagan and was a former board member of the Kelowna Women's Resource Centre.

Amanda Poon (BC Green Party) — Poon was an analyst at Interior Health who was active in public and mental health, agriculture, and food security work. She served as president of the Kelowna Downtown–Knox Mountain Neighbourhood Association and had volunteered at the Welcome Inn Shelter. She had worked with urban farmers and local food suppliers.

Local Issues

Homelessness and the opioid crisis were intertwined crises that defined downtown Kelowna in the years between elections. The Leon Avenue corridor—home to the Gospel Mission's emergency shelter, soup kitchen, and outreach services—became a flashpoint for community tension. By the summer of 2019, between sixty and eighty people were sleeping on the streets nightly, and by fall that number had doubled to over one hundred, with tents and tarp structures lining both sidewalks of the 200 block. In November 2019, the city dismantled the tent encampment, relocating roughly one hundred people to city-owned parks in the downtown north end. The episode exposed deep divisions between residents advocating for more supportive housing and harm-reduction services and those frustrated by the social disorder and public safety impacts in the city's commercial core.

Housing affordability remained the central economic concern in Kelowna—Mission. The speculation and vacancy tax, introduced in 2018, drew pointed debate in a riding where Merrifield's background in development made housing policy an especially charged question. Supporters credited the NDP's interventions with modestly increasing the rental vacancy rate, while critics—including many in the real estate industry—argued the tax was penalizing legitimate property owners and failing to address the supply-side constraints that kept prices high. The riding contained some of Kelowna's most desirable real estate alongside neighbourhoods where renters and first-time buyers were being priced out, and the gap between those two realities widened during the NDP's term.

Health care access was a priority for an aging population that depended heavily on Kelowna General Hospital and its associated specialists. The pandemic had delayed elective procedures and strained hospital capacity, and residents worried about the long-term effects on wait times and health outcomes. Interior Health's management of COVID-19 testing and outbreak response in seniors' facilities drew scrutiny across the region. Meanwhile, the opioid crisis continued to claim lives at record rates, with overdose deaths in the Interior Health region accelerating through 2020 as fentanyl contamination worsened and pandemic-related isolation disrupted access to treatment and harm-reduction services.

The forestry sector, which had been central to Thomson's tenure as minister, continued to evolve as the pine beetle legacy reshaped the Interior timber supply and global markets shifted. Climate change increased wildfire risk across the Okanagan, and the community's experience with wildfire smoke during recent summers reinforced concerns about air quality, public health, and the vulnerability of the urban-wildland interface. The pandemic added a further economic layer, as businesses along Bernard Avenue and in the tourism-dependent Mission district faced an uncertain season of reduced visitor traffic and public health restrictions.