Province puts up cash for Indigenous-led supervised drug site Site location 'west of Main Street' to be decided By: Malak Abas Posted: 11:42 AM CDT Friday, Jul. 12, 2024 Last Modified: 5:48 PM CDT Friday, Jul. 12, 2024 Updates

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At Manitoba’s first supervised consumption site, users will be able to do their laundry, receive primary medical care, seek addictions treatment and mental health counselling.

While it will be a place where people can safely and legally use drugs, the Aboriginal Health and Wellness Centre promised it will do much more than that, at a news conference to announce the site Friday.

“The work ahead is tremendous… my team and I are grateful that we have earned the trust of our city to be our province’s first supervised consumption site,” executive director Della Herrera told supporters to raucous applause.

It is believed it will be the first Indigenous-led supervised consumption site in Canada.

The centre will be in charge of the service design and delivery, along with a new co-ordinator from Shared Health, to integrate it into the health-care system.

The Manitoba government has earmarked $727,000 to go toward the site.

Addictions Minister Bernadette Smith said the funding will help pay to operate the site. Details are still being worked out.

One detail yet to be decided is the location of the site. Smith said centre staff are working with a corporate real estate agent to find the right location downtown “west of Main Street,” but no decision has been made.

“We want to make sure that we’re getting it right,” she said, noting it has to be decided how to consult with neighbours of the site once a location is chosen.

In Montreal Friday, federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre promised to pull funding to some supervised consumption sites if he’s elected prime minister, as he referred to them as “drug dens.”

“Wacko politicians and the Liberals and the NDP and their supporters in the media want to make it sounds like there’s a constitutional obligation that we allow these drug dens anywhere they want to go up. That is not true,” he said.

During a visit to a park near such a site in Montreal, Poilievre said he would shutter all locations near schools, playgrounds and “anywhere else that they endanger the public.”

“Radical bureaucrats don’t have the right to open these drug dens anywhere they want,” he said.

Smith insisted Friday that even if the Conservatives are elected, it would not affect operations in Manitoba.

“We will continue to move forward with a safe consumption site here in our province,” she said.

The announcement didn’t sit well with Manitoba Tories. Critic Carrie Hiebert accused the provincial leadership of investing in a model that doesn’t focus on treating addiction.

“The NDP still has no plan to put our loved ones seeking treatment on a path to recovery, or to limit the impacts they admit supervised consumption sites will cause in our communities,” she said in an emailed statement.

The NDP has said the supervised consumption site is supposed to open in 2025.

That timeline is within sight, said Monica Cyr, senior director of clinical operations at the centre, but theywill have to find a building soon — ideally, within four months — to be able to continue with the months-long process to get a federal government exemption required to allow the site to open.

“We recognize that right now, in this moment, and over the next 12 months, the amount of work hitting the ground running, getting this operational as soon as we possibly can,” she said. “First thing’s first, we need a building.”

Cyr said she doesn’t know what the capacity will be, but the site will likely run from early in the day until midnight. It will also be paired with a research satellite site, where staff will work with people who do drugs at the site on how to optimize the care offered.

“This is where we absolutely pull in the people who are using drugs and say, let’s figure this out. What’s important to you, what do you want to understand about your care?” she said.

The site will help people like Cody Guimond, who struggles with addiction and homelessness and works with Nine Circles Community Health Centre.

She has lost friends and partners to drugs and said intervention from the province is necessary to put a dent in the crisis on Manitoba’s streets.

She wants to see supervised consumption sites around the city.

“It’s mind-blowing how this is happening in our city,” she said.

There are 39 supervised consumption sites in Canada, but the closest thing Manitoba currently has is the mobile overdose prevention site run out of an RV fitted with a drug testing machine, which is operated by Sunshine House.

Sunshine House executive director Levi Foy said it’s undetermined whether the RV will close once the supervised site opens, but said staff who have the unique experience with Sunshine House will likely join or inform the permanent site.

“This process is going to take long…Until permanent services are established in neighbourhoods and communities designed by the people who live and work in this neighbourhoods and communities, we can be that kind of Band-Aid, for a little bit.”

The first supervised injection site opened in Vancouver more than 20 years ago.

The sites are intended to prevent overdoses by allowing people to take their drugs to use under the observation of trained staff. They also provide access to clean supplies to reduce rates of HIV and other diseases, as well as offer referrals to users seeking treatment options.

Health Canada says more than 40,000 people have died from using toxic drugs since 2016, when the agency began tracking these figures.

A 2011 Supreme Court ruling said closing the Vancouver operation would deprive users of their Charter rights.

Poilievre said that landmark decision does not mean supervised drug sites can operate anywhere without any restrictions.

He said he believes “reasonable restrictions” can be put in place to prevent them from opening “in locations that endanger the community, or where there is community opposition.”

Poilievre suggested the federal government has the power to close existing sites under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, under which it grants them an exemption to operate.

Poilievre’s office did not divulge specifics when asked how he would go about shuttering sites.

—with files from The Canadian Press

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

Every piece of reporting Malak produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.