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Kelowna's mayoral race has turned into a public-safety knife fight.

With 16 days until voting day, incumbent Tom Dyas and challenger Ron Cannan are fighting over who actually backs the police — and the gloves are off.

In a campaign video circulating this week, Dyas accused Cannan of voting against the resources Kelowna needs to fight crime and disorder.

"He voted against the RCMP officers. He voted against the bylaw. He voted against the firefighters," Dyas said, according to Global News.

Cannan isn't letting it stand.

"It's disingenuous in my mind to make that comment," Cannan said.

His version: he voted against the overall budget spending, not against public-safety resources specifically — and he supports continued investment, but wants existing resources audited and deployed more strategically first.

What business owners are saying

Meanwhile, downtown businesses are living the version of this debate that doesn't fit in a campaign video.

Business owner Gerald Goertsen told Global News that over the weekend, security cameras caught someone ripping the lavender plants out of the side of his commercial building.

"We care about those less fortunate," Goertsen said. "We give a lot of money to charity and we do care. But when they're vandalizing and smashing our windows and locking us in our building and tearing out our plants, that's got to stop."

How we got here

Public safety is Cannan's signature issue — the former MP and current councillor is running on a pledge to "clean up Kelowna one block at a time."

A public-safety debate on September 17 drew a full house, and prediction markets moved against Cannan afterward, trimming his odds from 58 per cent to 45 per cent, according to prediction-market tracker Prediction.com.

Dyas, meanwhile, has asked Ottawa to shut down Kelowna's supervised consumption site, CBC reported — a signal this election will be fought on the ground, not in the policy weeds.

Cannan says if elected, he'd hold a town hall with the business community on deploying resources more efficiently: "Just adding more officers maybe is not the best answer. It's how they're deployed, and looking strategically at where those resources are best allocated."

The record this term

For context: this council added 34 RCMP officers, 17 bylaw enforcement officers and 18 firefighters over the 2023–2026 term, funded partly through a dedicated one-per-cent community safety levy, according to the Business Examiner.

Official stats say some crime categories are trending down; plenty of business owners say they don't believe it — and don't report everything anymore.

What's next

The final council-candidate forum of the campaign is tonight, October 1, at Revelry on Ellis Street — doors at 6 p.m., debate at 6:30, meet-and-greet after.

The three mayoral candidates — Dyas, Cannan and Andrew Uitvlugt — face off October 7 at the Mary Irwin Theatre.

General voting day is October 17.

Show up. Ask the hard question. Vote.