'Be better': VicPD criticizes Island Health interaction with alleged drug trafficker on consumption site doorstep - " “A service provider is coming out, engaging with this drug trafficker while this drug trafficker is making transactions. It’s unprofessional. I’m extremely disappointed to see that,” said Victoria Police Chief Del Manak on Tuesday. “That is absolutely unacceptable.” As part of ‘Project 3D’, Victoria undercover officers observed a service provider talking with a man posted up in a lawn chair allegedly trafficking cocaine to a lineup of customers, on the front stoop of an Island Health consumption site on the 900-block of Pandora called The Harbour."
B.C. politician pushes bill to force schools to say drugs are bad - "The B.C. Conservatives are calling for measures to keep “radical drug lobbyists” out of schools after a school event that featured info cards on how to do drugs such as cocaine, meth and GHB. “This isn’t education. It is grooming kids into drug culture,” said B.C. Conservative MLA Steve Kooner in a Tuesday statement endorsing his private member’s bill that, if passed, would compel schools to “explicitly discourage drug use.” The event in question was a Pride festival sanctioned by the Nanaimo-Ladysmith Public Schools District. After accompanying her 10-year-old to the event, Nanaimo, B.C. mother Ruth Taylor alerted local media to the presence of postcard-sized leaflets that local media described as “drug use information cards.” A card labelled “meth,” for instance, details the drug’s euphoric effects, its reported ability to increase libido and even includes recommended dosages... A card for GHB, a common date-rape drug, reads that the substance can “make the user feel more relaxed and more sociable.” It adds, “G can also increase libido.” The cards were among the literature offered at a booth run by AIDS Vancouver Island, a harm reduction non-profit funded in part by government bodies such as Island Health and the Public Health Agency of Canada. Taylor told Chek News that she confronted AIDS Vancouver Island about the materials being inappropriate for schoolchildren, but that “they were not receptive to what I was saying” and “the cards stayed for the remainder of the event.”... The DanceSafe cards are far from the first time that a Canadian school event has run into controversy for making materials available to minor that either facilitated drug use or encouraged risky behaviour. Two years ago, a B.C. high school just north of Nanaimo came under fire after a drug awareness presentation concluded with the session leader distributing “safer snorting” kits. The kit included plastic straws and cards to cut powdered drugs into lines that could then be snorted. “Have condoms and lube with you. You may want to have sex while high,” read an accompanying booklet. That same year, a Canadian chapter of Planned Parenthood was barred from presenting in Saskatchewan schools after a sex education programmer distributed graphic cards describing fringe sex acts involving defecation and urine."
Geoff Russ: If involuntary treatment for addicts is a radical solution, so be it - "Every day, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is pushed further to the brink, and the cause of that decline is not a mystery. Horrible choices made by generation after generation of political leaders have resulted in mass addiction, homelessness, and urban decay. The Downtown Eastside (DTES) is a containment zone, almost akin to District 9, where drug use, human chaos, and death are corralled. The City of Vancouver, British Columbia’s provincial government, and Ottawa have all played a role in managing this horrifying decline of life... many of these unfortunate people are incapable of making coherent decisions or looking after themselves, let alone each other. Is it an infringement on personal liberty? Perhaps. However, liberty is a privilege of those able to properly exercise it, and those suffering from severe addiction are not of sound mind, nor do they have the power of true choice. Leaving them to wander alleyways is to treat them like free-range livestock. It is an abdication of responsibility to help our fellow Canadians. Allegedly “compassionate” approaches have achieved little else aside from prolonging the unhappy lives of young men and women as their addiction to fentanyl and other drugs slowly melts their minds and bodies, as is the norm in B.C. There is no justification for it beyond progressive platitudes, which have been exposed by the passage of time and a mounting death toll as nothing more than sweetly worded inhumanity. Excluding policing and senior government spending, Vancouver’s current operations intended to help homeless drug users with mental illness cost a tall $50 million annually. The cash is burned on “management” at the street level, daily emergency responses, and cleanups. Single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels are filthy, cluttered, and dangerously prone to catching fire. Vancouver Fire Rescue Services responds to an average of one SRO fire per day in the DTES. Nobody can pretend that these hundreds of millions of dollars have been well spent. All they do is delay the inevitable until a siren wails and another dead Canadian is delivered to the coroner. It will require stern political will, but it is worth it to clean up the DTES and other drug-filled neighbourhoods across Canada. Wiping clean the open-air drug use and rapidly shifting people into involuntary care is true, tough compassion, both for those suffering from addiction and for the wider public... Giving a clean bed, warm accommodations, and three meals a day to somebody in an enforced drug-free environment is worth the controversy of a Charter challenge, rather than letting them fade away. Alberta has already shown that prioritizing treatment works, and its approach is gentle. Calling it the “recovery-oriented” system, Alberta has provided on-demand access to medication, therapeutic, supervised living units, and a pathway to long-term recovery for those who want it. In February, opioid-related deaths had collapsed by nearly 40 percent since 2023. That is progress, no matter how much harm reduction activists may grumble about it, and it is a resounding success for Danielle Smith’s government."
If involuntary treatment for addicts is a radical solution, so be it. Harm reduction policies are in retreat across Canada, and there are no moderate solutions to the addictions crisis. : r/ilovebc - "Until these zombies start to massively enter the rich neighbourhoods, or start to be regular pests in the well off areas were they to build a "supportive" housing unit beside some politicians home, the laws will never change"
Here’s Why Involuntary Care Won’t Work for Most People : r/britishcolumbia - "What we’re doing is not working"
"We've tried nothing and we're out of ideas!"
"What do you mean? We're doing almost everything that "advocates" have said to do.
-safe injection sites -tiny homes -shelters -wet facilities -safe supply -social outreach
I'm sure I'm missing a ton of initiatives. Maybe they're not being done perfectly, but the money is there. So Blake the social workers for their poor execution I guess? Our maybe, just maybe, it'll be all of this, combined with something new? I don't know. But it's a pretty true statement that what we're currently doing is not working."
Of course, one cope in the comments is there wasn't enough safe supply and safe injection sites
Here’s Why Involuntary Care Won’t Work for Most People : r/britishcolumbia - "I think a lot of folks don't understand...involuntary care is the compassionate choice. The cruel choice is rounding up all the undesirables and turning them into landfill. And to be honest, society is not as far away from doing that as some folks think."
"There are only two things that keep people from harming others: morality, and authority. For the past decade people have been pushed that letting people effectively light themselves on fire and burn everyone around them is more moral than effectively imprisoning them for their own good, because involuntary care is very susceptible to abuses even in the modern age. For the past decade people have watched streets and entire neighborhoods decay over the justice and reform systems being completely ineffectual against the homeless and drug crises because they're entirely lacking in follow-through. There are only two things that are keeping people from snapping and badly hurting the addicts: flawed morality and failing authority. Here in Victoria, we've actually had it really easy compared to most other places. There are small towns up island and entire cities in the US falling apart at the seams over their own crises, and people are snapping there. Someone tweaks a little too hard, has a psychotic episode, they attack someone, and someone else puts them down hard. Then the police go after that person even harder to send a message, building up immense amounts of resentment and distrust against them too. The only reason we haven't seen that kind of violence here is because people haven't been pressed hard enough, and I don't want to see that change."
Here’s Why Involuntary Care Won’t Work for Most People : r/britishcolumbia - "I work ambulance. Smaller/mid-size working class town. Called today for a man going into businesses in his wheelchair and pissing on the floor. Police issue. They didn't arrest. They told him to leave the area. Another crew went to him 3 hours later because a good citizen called in what they thought was a suffering old man in a wheelchair. He told the crew to fuck off. We won't take him anyways, he SA's any female medic he sees (pulls his pants down and starts jerking off ) and he's banned from the hospital unless he's unconscious/actively dying. I'm gonna lose my fucking job one day because of this guy, because I don't wanna get pissed on and I try, I try so fucking hard to remain compassionate to this convicted rapist because his life sucks, etc, but to the bystander it just looks like I'm giving subpar care to a senior (dudes like 55, just looks like shit cause his life is shit) because we're sick of this guy. He needs to be incarcerated but no one will do it. And what the average person doesn't know is some version of this guy exists in every town, and a hundred fold in each city. I swear to you all, we need some form of involuntary care. We need mental health supports for these people, but there isn't a path to a normal life for these people either. There's no rehabilitation for some, it's just trying to minimize their suffering, and even the shittiest of them deserve some dignity on the process, even if I'm fucking sick of them. It's a battleground out there."
"Emergency room RN here. As time goes by I start feel that "Harm Reduction" isn't for the addicted person; it's for us, the healthcare workers to help reduce the chances of harm inflicted on us by this population of people when they come into our departments. It feels more and more like a "just give them what they want" situation so they don't go wild on us hurting someone."
"As an RN... totally agree. Some people are truly beyond rehabilitation/remediation and others could actually turn their lives around with proper care but would never choose it while in the thick of addiction. I actually think we are doing these people a massive disservice by pretending they are capable adults, when most of the time they are not. I also feel the obligation to protect others in our society should outweigh the misguided need to "maintain" capacity in the incapacitated. Enough is enough, it's time to call a spade a spade."
"Amen - in education too. We pretend kids are tiny, developed adults and we absolutely are putting too much on them too fast when we need to be parenting and guiding them and not letting them ruin their lives and others' lives."
DeepDive: Opposition to supervised consumption sites is growing—but the mainstream media hasn’t seemed to notice - "For decades, supervised consumption sites (sometimes called “safe injection sites”) were heralded as a life-saving innovation by Canadian public health officials and supported by most municipal, provincial, and federal governments. A famous Supreme Court decision in 2011, coupled with the Trudeau government’s relaxed policy for creating new sites, contributed to an elite consensus that consumption sites—and the harm reduction philosophy underpinning them—were an unambiguous public health good for individuals and communities. As this DeepDive shows, that consensus is eroding—albeit slowly, and in some institutions more than others. There has been a growing pushback against supervised consumption and harm reduction policies from provincial governments, academics, physicians, journalists, and community organizations. Yet this resistance has not penetrated most elite institutions. My analysis shows how the federal government, courts, and news reports from mainstream media outlets remain strongly supportive of supervised consumption sites, despite growing concerns about the efficacy of this approach to drug addiction. As provincial governments find creative ways to move away from harm reduction, they will face an uphill public relations battle... supervised consumption sites went to the court—and won. After victories in lower courts, in 2011 a unanimous Supreme Court held that the federal government’s decision not to grant Insite an exemption violated the Charter right to “life, liberty and security of the person.”... As supervised consumption sites became normalized, a parallel policy development occurred: “safer supply.” This policy involves prescribing free drugs—opioids, stimulants, or benzodiazepines—to drug users “as a safer alternative to the toxic illegal drug supply to people who are at high risk of overdose.”... Safer supply has been heavily criticized. Journalist Adam Zivo has regularly documented how these drugs have been diverted to the black market in British Columbia and Ontario, with police, addictions experts, academics, and physicians claiming safer supply has exacerbated the opioid crisis, particularly among youth. Even the Globe and Mail has published op-eds criticizing safer supply (though its lead health columnist has called safer supply diversion “trivial”). The parallel developments of safer supply, B.C.’s failed experiment with decriminalizing drug use in public spaces, and the normalization of supervised consumption sites have led to push back from provincial governments... In Ontario, Superior Court Justice John Callaghan granted an injunction in March preventing the government from banning sites within 200 metres of a school or daycare. Justice Callaghan held that consumption sites “provide both lifesaving and health benefits” and that permitting the sites to remain open “will have a substantial public benefit of preventing serious health risks and deaths.”... First, even in the face of provincial opposition, the federal government continues to promote a highly sanitized and “clinical” narrative on supervised consumption sites. Drug users are referred to as “clients,” while the sites themselves provide “a safe, clean space for people to bring their own drugs to use in the presence of trained staff.” As the evidence for harm reduction is increasingly contested, Canada’s federal government remains undeterred. Second, supervised consumption proponents continue to have a firm ally in the courts. Fourteen years after the Supreme Court of Canada found that Vancouver’s supervised consumption site had “no discernible negative impact on the public safety and health objectives,” an Ontario court declared that consumption sites provide such “lifesaving and health benefits” and that government cannot even prevent them from operating near daycares or schools. In recent years, provincial superior courts have issued injunctions or declared rights violations when governments have tried to evict people from encampments, prevent public drug use, ban panhandling, and even remove bike lanes. It is no surprise that consumption sites were next on the list. Third, mainstream media reporting on Ontario’s judicial injunction was far more likely to cite supporters than opponents of supervised consumption sites, leading readers to believe that the only opposition to such sites comes from conservative provincial governments... Finally, recent events show that politicians opposed to supervised consumption sites can find clever ways around adverse judicial decisions."
DeepDive: Opposition to supervised consumption sites is growing—but the mainstream media hasn’t seemed to notice : r/ilovebc - "What we are doing hasn’t made communities safer, hasn’t decreased homelessness and hasn’t decreased crime."
"That's not the goal of these places. They reduce OD deaths and the spread of HIV and other diseases. Thats it. It comes at the cost of making the area it's in completely uninhabitable by regular people or businesses. When homeless addicts get hiv or OD it costs us a lot, but so does ruining downtown for everyone. All im saying is it's more complicated than giving free needles just to be nice."
It's hard to see a reduction in deaths in the data too
Julian Somers: The Charter should protect the public, not just drug users - "When two operators of Vancouver’s Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) were found guilty of possession for the purpose of trafficking last month, no one should have been surprised. Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicum were charged in October 2023 after running a storefront “compassion club” in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for a little more than a year. During that time, the pair bought illicit drugs — heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine — off the dark web, had them tested at a University of Victoria lab to ensure purity, and sold the drugs to the club’s 43 members for cost. Their stated goal was to prevent deaths attributed to drug poisoning. Although the B.C. government-funded club was granted an exemption from Vancouver Coastal Health for the testing, packaging and supervised consumption of drugs, Health Canada had denied an exemption for the purchase of the drugs off the dark web “because of the associated public health and safety risks.” Furthermore, Nyx and Kalicum were warned that they would be in violation of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) if they did purchase the drugs off the dark web. DULF opened regardless, and operated until police eventually intervened and Nyx and Kalicum were charged — days before the club was to close under order by B.C.’s Health Ministry. Now that the pair have been found guilty, their defence has moved into the realm of human rights with a Constitutional challenge. Is Canada’s Charter relevant to their case? From a psychological standpoint, yes. But in the opposite way to what DULF’s lawyers are arguing... B.C. is the only jurisdiction on Earth that has not only decriminalized the public use of illicit drugs but also dispensed pharmaceuticals to people who live in poverty with untreated addictions and promoted illegal drug user co-ops. Those policies were advised against by many authorities and have predictably yielded profound harms. The B.C. government tried unsuccessfully to curtail its decriminalization experiment after a little more than a year, and in July of this year the federal government quietly announced it was discontinuing support for its “safe supply” initiative. But while they were in place, both policies compromised the security rights of citizens and drove addiction, poisonings, public intoxication, business closures, theft and violent crime. More Canadians have died from drugs in the past 10 years (January 2016 to March 2025) than were sacrificed in the Second World War. A Statistics Canada report found that 63.4 per cent of B.C. overdoses between 2014 and 2016 involved individuals who were unemployed. According to the B.C. Coroner’s Service, drug poisoning was the leading cause of death among the province’s youth between 2019 and 2023; two-thirds of those kids had been recipients of government care. Yet no B.C. policies prioritize helping marginalized drug users to regain employment or ensure that high-risk youth are supported through the transition to adulthood. Other jurisdictions prevent and treat addictions by supporting basic rights that have well-established influences on addiction, including healthy housing, support gaining employment, and achieving social integration. And it is the absence of attention to those rights that violates both the letter and intent of Canada’s Charter... it would set a dangerous precedent to affirm that illegal drug trafficking is justifiable when governments drive citizens to addiction. For example, a recent drug-related murder in B.C. was described by police as a “targeted and brazen shooting in a high-traffic area” with “complete disregard for public safety.” If violating the law to engage in trafficking is a reasonable response to unreasonable drug policies, would courts similarly exonerate citizens who illegally carried concealed firearms to protect themselves from drug-fuelled violence?"
Derek Finkle: Injection site workers now admit drug dealing was rampant - "The province of Ontario did something last month it has never done before — it defunded a supervised injection site because the chaos and disorder it was causing had reached unacceptable levels for the surrounding neighbours. The injection site is in Parkdale, a neighbourhood on the west side of Toronto... The minister’s spokesperson cited a 53 per cent increase in break and enters within approximately one mile of the Parkdale injection site over the course of the year to date and a 36 per cent increase in assaults since 2018, when the injection site opened. Had the minister cut funding to an injection site even a year or two ago, activists would have promptly staged die-in protests in front of the provincial legislature, carrying signs accusing the government of the mass murder of drug users. That didn’t happen this time — for two reasons. First, nine injection sites in Ontario, four of which were in Toronto, were closed in March due to provincial legislation prohibiting sites from operating within 200 metres of schools and daycare facilities, and not only did overdose rates not skyrocket as activists had predicted, they actually went down... The second reason protests about the Parkdale site closure were muted had to do with another injection site, one I happen to live across the street from in east Toronto, which, up until its closure in March, operated in the South Riverdale Community Health Centre. South Riverdale made national headlines in the summer of 2023 when a mother of two young children, Karolina Huebner-Makurat, was killed by drug dealers outside of the site who exchanged gun fire after a physical altercation. The murder trial for Damian Hudson, the drug dealer who, according to the agreed statement of facts, has conceded to having fired the bullet that killed Huebner-Makurat, got under way in late October. The first two witnesses, both employees at the South Riverdale injection site, quickly exposed many of the lies my neighbourhood was told about what was going on around our site prior to the shooting. The day of the shooting, the vice president of the South Riverdale health centre, Shannon Wiens, who has since become its CEO, submitted a six-page incident report to the province. In that report, Wiens succinctly described the circumstances that led to the tragedy: “Three individuals got in a fight and it erupted in gunfire.” Nowhere in Wiens’s report are these men referred to as drug dealers; just “individuals.”... South Riverdale (and aligned activists) adopted a cagey crisis-management strategy that declined to acknowledge its injection site had anything to do with drug dealers it allowed to operate with impunity on its perimeter, even after one of its harm-reduction staffers, Khalila Mohammed, was arrested for aiding and abetting one of the drug dealers who’d attacked Hudson in his escape from the scene... When Tara Riley told her story in the National Post about what it was like to work at South Riverdale’s injection site for years, the centre’s CEO at the time, Jason Altenberg, took exception to Riley writing about how drug dealers often wormed their way into the injection site and sold illegal drugs to clients from inside the site... South Riverdale harm reduction employee Samuel MacLeod testified... that it was quite common for the site’s clients to buy drugs, usually fentanyl, inside the site. As for drug dealing around the site, MacLeod said it was rampant. One of MacLeod’s colleagues, Derek Venman, testified he saw “a lot of drug dealing” in the courtyard next to the injection site. Hudson had been known to staff for at least a year prior to the shooting. The jury heard Venman say that Ahmed Ibrahim, the drug dealer Mohammed had assisted in his getaway... was selling drugs right outside South Riverdale daily in the weeks leading up to the killing. Ibrahim was such a common fixture, Venman testified, that no one thought twice about him walking inside the health centre to get water when he was thirsty or use the washroom. Wiens, in the incident report, responded to a question asking what she would recommend “to prevent a reoccurrence” with eight words: “Reduction of guns and gangs in the city.” What if Wiens and her management team hadn’t created a culture that resulted in armed drug dealers being warmly embraced for years right outside of her injection site? In 2016, before the site opened, South Riverdale warranted to the Toronto Board of Health and its neighbours that it would adhere to a “zero-tolerance drug dealing policy.” The site’s negligent abandonment of this promise came into focus... when staff gathered for a debrief after the shooting, management’s primary concern was not “guns and gangs” but how this fatal shooting was going to impact their injection site. Not only did MacLeod agree that South Riverdale management said it “wanted to control the narrative in a way that protected the safe injection site,” he testified that management was applying pressure on him when the director of the site, Sarah Greig, inserted herself in his interview with police forty-five minutes after the shooting... I submitted an access to information request to obtain all reports and communications related to that renewal application approval. After receiving nothing for months, I filed a complaint with the federal information commissioner... The information commissioner ordered the federal health minister to provide a complete response within 60 business days... Health Canada continues to flout the order... I was contacted by legal counsel for the information commissioner’s office, who advised that they are taking Health Canada to court. Given the way in which the revelations about what was really going on in and around our injection site, which existed within 150 metres of two elementary schools and six daycare facilities, are now coming fast and furious at the Hudson trial, Health Canada’s unlawful denial of public information about a controversial health policy it has promoted in a shroud of secrecy for years is both deeply concerning and a slap in the face of democracy."
How decriminalisation made Vancouver the fentanyl capital of the world - "Manufactured in numerous illicit labs in Canada’s wilderness, fentanyl is now so common in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside that you can literally pick it up off the street. Vancouver once topped the charts of the world’s “most desirable places to live”. Its reputation is that of a city which provides the perfect balance – a metropolis “perched on the edge of nature” combining “outdoor recreation and a great cultural diversity”, as one local website puts it. But a landmark experiment to decriminalise the possession of certain drugs in public – including fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, and ecstasy – has allowed an opioid crisis to take hold that surpasses even the epidemic in the United States... The death rate in Vancouver itself now stands at 56 per 100,000 people – nearly three times the national average. And in the Downtown Eastside, the rate is nearly 30 times higher than the rest of the country. For comparison, England and Wales have a drug-related mortality rate of 8.4 per 100,000 people. In Scotland – the worst in Europe – it stands at 19.8. The only G7 country with anything close to a comparable rate is the United States, at 32.6 per 100,000 people. With the city gripped in an opioid epidemic nearly twice as fatal as America’s, the Downtown Eastside is becoming a key battleground for the province’s decriminalisation debate... In the first year of British Columbia’s decriminalisation rollout, public drug use exploded – with reports of people injecting heroin on family beaches and smoking crack in maternity wards. Fiona Wilson, the deputy chief constable of the Vancouver Police Department, says the experiment has tied the hands of police across the city, leaving the wider community at risk. Despite having seized over 1,000 kilos of fentanyl from dealers in 2023 alone, officers are powerless to intervene when they see it used on the streets. “Decriminalisation has been a massive challenge for the police because it’s taken away our ability to arrest someone. We don't have any grounds to approach a person who is publicly using illicit drugs in the absence of any other criminality,” she says. “If someone is sitting at a coffee shop and wants to snort a line of cocaine, we don’t have any authority to intervene in that situation. This presents a real problem because families don't necessarily want to sit next to somebody in a restaurant who's shooting up fentanyl.” On the other side of the debate, left-wing advocates for liberalisation have sought to frame the debate around privilege and class... “Decriminalisation is not about drugs anymore, it’s about power and control. Drugs have been killing people for decades, now it’s toxic politics.” Elenore Sturko, the shadow minister for mental health and addictions, says decriminalisation has been a “dangerous and disastrous” policy failure. “The entire policy was politically motivated. Clearly, the government didn't do the work on decriminalisation. In fact, they ignored the advice of the police. Now, we end up where we are today – not only failing to reduce death and overdoses, but actually causing increased harm.”... Not only are safer supply drugs being diverted to active users, there are also reports of these powerful opioids falling into the hands of children. Ms Sturko explains that highly addictive drugs are freely going out into every corner of the community, allowing new users to develop opioid use disorders. “Parents in Vancouver are telling me stories of their children using high quantities of dillies [hydromorphone] because they thought the opioid was ‘safe’ under the government’s label of ‘safer supply’,” she says. “It’s horrifying. It makes me angry because we're talking about the lives of our children who may start experimenting with an opioid that won’t kill them, but it eventually leads them to use fentanyl which will kill them. “It’s a potential pathway of serious addiction. These safer supply drugs are subsidising the fentanyl market.”... Ms Graham goes as far as to claim that the police are against a regulated drugs market and because it threatens their jobs. “We need to solve the toxic drugs crisis by providing the substances,” she insists. Andrew, a paramedic in the Downtown Eastside, has responded to hundreds – if not thousands – of overdose calls during his time as a first responder. In his view, the government is “subsidising and enabling” the fentanyl crisis by throwing money at it instead of solving it... Ms Graham, who witnesses the carnage of the Downtown Eastside on a daily basis, says hope is the one thing she can’t afford to lose sight of. “I’ve lost a school bus full of people to opioids. But there is a way forward, and it’s increased harm reduction,” she insists. “This isn’t a political debate, it’s a human rights debate.”"
Clearly, capitalism is the reason why drug deaths are so bad in Vancouver, and it would be even worse without Harm Reduction, so we need to give out even more free drugs and free crack pipes. The statistics show that Vancouver is the home of Capitalism in Canada, so they need a Communist revolution to save lives
The activist is right that toxic politics are killing people - but not in the way that she means
Gold: NDP tries to rig consumption site consultations — again - "affected residents, property owners, and businesses were given less than three business days’ notice to drop everything if they wanted to have a say. That is, if they were even told... An employee at an automotive shop in the area wondered, “Shouldn’t everyone at least have gotten flyers in their mailboxes?” The next surprise in the email was that “seating at the session may be limited, and is available on a first-come, first-served basis.”... It’s the latest dirty trick by Wab Kinew’s government to manufacture consensus for his election promise to allow hard-core drug addicts to get high in a “safe” government-owned building. He knows that people with jobs, kids, and businesses to run can’t easily — if at all — drop everything to make alternate arrangements to attend a meeting on a Tuesday evening. And it appears Kinew and his floundering Housing and Addictions Minister, Bernadette Smith, are counting on it. On Saturday, a source with eyes and ears on the street told me, “Sounds like a big group of local ‘harm reduction activists’ are planning to pack the in-person meeting early and have it reach capacity so opponents will be left out.” While the email stated, “This research is being conducted by PRA Inc., a CRIC member company that follows the CRIC Pledge to Canadians,” questions are already being raised about whether that pledge covers this kind of deliberate engineering — by the proponents — of a meeting held on unrealistically short notice. It’s not an emergency, except to Kinew and Smith. It is also being held with deliberately restricted seating capacity. And make no mistake, it is deliberate, because there’s a hall within the radius that has an occupancy permit allowing 400 citizens to attend. It’s not just within the radius — it’s across the street: the Pampanga Banquet Hall. It’s obvious Kinew and Smith are desperate to avoid any repeat of the pushback their last proposal encountered, which led to the scuttling of their grand plan for a safe injection site at 200 Disraeli Freeway across from Argyle High School east of Main Street. Smith stated, “The proposed supervised consumption site … is located where people need the services and sits well beyond 250 metres from any school or registered child care facility.” While that’s technically true, it is also misleading. Because Giizhigooweyaabikwe Park, located at 242 Lizzie St., is about 125 metres south across Logan Avenue. The park has undergone $350,000 in renovations since 2018 and is described by the City as “a 1.5-acre oasis in the city’s Centennial neighbourhood.” It is mostly used by families, residents, and area organizations that — how convenient — are located outside the radius and therefore won’t have their concerns or opinions counted. “You are right about the park, it will be a permanent encampment with drug deals 24/7,” a reader who works in the social services field told me. “I challenge any of these politicians to go take a walk around Insite in Vancouver after the sun goes down and tell us how safe it is.” They added, “Businesses in this neighbourhood are going to lose their minds… this is going to bankrupt everyone within two blocks; and when those businesses leave, you won’t be able to sell or lease the property next door to this dystopian nightmare.” “There are a number of great Chinese restaurants in the area,” said another source with clients in the neighbourhood. “I occasionally go and have dim sum at them. One waitress was close to tears — she said the NDP know they have problems speaking English and pushing back. They know what happens when they put these God-awful places in, they feel abandoned.” The NDP has chosen a location that, unlike the vibrant residents’ groups in the East Exchange and Point Douglas, has no active community representation that I can identify."
Woke Canadian lawmaker admits taxpayer cash is being used to give free crack pipes to addicts - "A liberal Canadian lawmaker has admitted that taxpayer money was being used to fund crack pipes for addicts. Kendal Weber, Health Canada's assistant deputy minister, made the admission as she was being grilled by Dan Mazier, a Conservative member of Canada's Parliament. He asked her at a House of Commons committee: 'On October 2nd, you testified at this committee that no funding from Health Canada was being used to purchase crack pipes. Do you still stand by this answer today?' 'While Health Canada does not directly purchase harm reduction supplies, Health Canada does provide funding to community organizations that do invest in prevention, harm reduction and in treatment projects,' Weber said. She started to add that the funding could be used for 'harm reduction supplies to minimize the transmission' when Mazier cut her off. 'It was a pretty direct question,' he said. 'Is any of the funding from Health Canada being used to purchase crack pipes? It was just a yes or no answer.' Weber confirmed: 'Yes, we do provide funding to community organizations for harm reduction tools including pipes.'... 'Just months ago, they said no public funds were spent on this. They lied.' The conservative politician accused Canada's Liberal Party of continuing to 'promote rampant drug use instead of recovery.' Mazier previously told the House of Commons that he had found a vending machine 'full of drug supplies such as foil and crack pipes' on a recent trip to British Columbia. 'Anyone could access these drug supplies, because they were free and accessible,' he said on November 24. Mazier asked whether the Canadian government 'should be funding vending machines full of crack pipes' or if they should fund treatment 'that gets addicts off this poison that is killing them.'... 'I used it myself to see how easy it was,' Mazier wrote on X. 'No ID. No questions.' He said: 'A toddler could use it.'"
Is anyone OK with no jail time for accessory to a killing?: Selley - "Khalila Mohammed had a hell of a day on July 7, 2023. When an alleged drug-related robbery outside the Toronto supervised-injection clinic where she worked led to a shootout, in which an innocent passerby was killed, she decided to help the wounded alleged robber (who is not accused of firing a shot, but is charged with manslaughter): tending to his injuries; stashing away his bloody clothes; facilitating his fleeing the scene; advising him to lay low; and lying to police about what happened. She later pursued a romantic relationship with him... Mohammed was a worker at the South Riverdale Community Health Centre and a supporter of harm reduction and drug decriminalization. The victim was passerby, Karolina Huebner-Makurat, by all accounts a much-beloved mother of two. Ironically, considering her apparently beyond-reason devotion to the harm-reduction (or drug-taking?) cause, Mohammed, and indeed the clinic where she worked, also played a significant role in knocking centrist Canadians and even generally-lefty Torontonians away from harm reduction as a model for coping with the opioids crisis. Mohammed’s lawyer, the estimable Brian Greenspan, said she developed “misplaced compassion” even toward the people selling the clinic’s clients the garbage that supervised-injection facilities are supposed to protect them from, should they overdose on the garbage in question. Not even a month after the shooting outside the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, the same facility was found to be offering chocolate bars in exchange for used needles — not just to their clients (which really isn’t a bad idea), but on a sign in their front window to the general public, effectively encouraging people (say, neighbourhood kids) to hunt down dirty drug needles. “In an exuberance to get used needles off the street one of our staff posted a sign that was never meant for the public. In no way, shape, or form was that communication meant for children,” Jason Altenberg, CEO of the facility, bizarrely told National Post at the time. Who is “exuberant” about cleaning up needles in the vicinity of supervised-injection facilities? One of the selling points of such facilities was they were supposed to lead to fewer used needles scattered around the neighbourhood. For myriad reasons, it hasn’t worked — or if it has, the effects have been swallowed whole by the larger opioids problem, which (fingers crossed!) reached its nadir during the COVID-19 pandemic... Khalila Mohammed won’t spend a day behind bars for her astonishing series of decisions on July 7, 2023 — not unless she violates the terms of her so-called “house arrest,” which allows her to leave home for work, education, to go to the gym, for counselling, for family emergencies, to perform community service … well, OK, it’s less “house arrest” than a “regular daily routine,” but she’s not allowed to be out after 11 p.m. The Crown, to its credit, argued for a proper custodial sentence that somewhat fit the crime: two years behind bars. “People who have done less have been put in jail. A conditional sentence is not sufficient,” prosecutor Jay Spare told Ontario Court of Justice Judge Russell Silverstein. “Denunciation and deterrence require actual jail.” This is a crucial point that often seems lost in modern mainstream criminal-justice discussions: The notions of denunciation and deterrence aren’t relics of the Dark Ages; they’re explicitly stated goals of criminal sentencing."
B.C. health authorities tried to allow purchase of regulated heroin without prescriptions, court hears - The Globe and Mail - "B.C. health authorities tried for four years to create a heroin compassion club whose members could purchase a regulated version of the drug without a prescription, an effort to reduce toxic-drug deaths that was ultimately derailed by political blowback."
Meme - Canada Proud: "This is what happens when you let the NDP run your province."
"A new report says that there is so much fentanyl being smoked in BC supportive housing offices that workers are being exposed to it even when they're in their offices with the doors closed. This was concluded from testing 14 different facilities.
JUST ANOTHER DAY IN BC UNDER DAVID EBY'S
NDP SOURCE: Vancouver Sun, July 21, 2025"
