Establishing supervised drug-consumption site will take time, NDP says

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/11/2023 (991 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The province is going to take ‘some time’ to get a promised supervised drug-consumption site up and running in downtown Winnipeg, the cabinet minister expected to get it done said Thursday.

“We aren’t at the stage where we know where we’re going to put it yet, what that’s going to look like,” NDP Housing, Addictions and Homelessness Minister Bernadette Smith said at an unrelated news conference.

“We do know that we want to make sure that it’s done properly. We’re not rushing into it.”

Premier Wab Kinew listed the establishment of a site as one of Smith’s priorities in her ministerial mandate letter, released earlier this week.

The election campaign promise followed the previous Progressive Conservative government’s steadfast opposition to creating a facility similar to those operating in other areas of the country. Despite calls from advocates to rethink the decision and take action to save the lives of street-drug addicts, the Tory position was to focus on rehabilitation measures.

The facility will be more than just a supervised place to take drugs, Smith suggested.

“We want to make sure that when we do it, that there’s services that are there, you know, whether someone comes in and needs primary health care, whether they need to access dentistry or they need access to trauma support, psychiatry even so much as a chiropractor,” she said, adding she has visited facilities in other provinces with a “one-stop-shop” model that also make same-day addictions treatment options available.

“It’s going to take some time,” she said. “We are talking and we are making sure that we are listening to the experts; we are a listening government, so it is something that we are working on.”

Building the province’s first supervised consumption site is listed as one of the priorities the new NDP government has set for Smith in her ministerial portfolio, according to minister mandate letters the government released this week.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca