One week after taking a victory lap on safer streets, the B.C. government is getting yanked back into reality by municipal councils and police frustrated by the rising street disorder, crime and public safety concerns around safe consumption sites.
In Nanaimo, Coun. Ian Thorpe put forward a motion on Monday to demand the Vancouver Island Health Authority close an overdose prevention site located next to city hall. The city had previously considered erecting a 10-foot-tall fence around the municipal property to address vandalism, crime and safety issues from the site that were hurting city staff and residents.
“The consumption site is a symbol of our failed government policy,” Thorpe told radio station CFAX.
“What I want council to do, and I hope eventually we might, is to send a message to the province saying, please look again at your policy of how we're dealing with drugs on our streets and let's see if there's a different and a better way of supporting these people.”
Council voted to defer the motion for a month, to get more information from Island Health.
Thorpe called the BC NDP government’s experiment on decriminalization, and its normalization of open drug use in the name of compassion, “an abject failure.”
That’s not something New Democrats will ever admit. Solicitor General Nina Krieger just last week took credit for new statistics that show a drop in the overall provincial crime rate.
"This reduction is also the result of focused investments in policing, mental-health and addictions supports, housing and crime-prevention initiatives,” she said.
Baloney, say on-the-ground local politicians, who appear to see what New Democrats cannot, or will not, acknowledge.
“It has to do with theft and violence, open drug dealing, the kind of fears, the behaviours, the psychosis that many people suffer from during the course of the day, the general street disorder, the cleanliness, the small fires,” Nanaimo Mayor Leonard Krog told CBC.
“It's that sense of fear that may or may not be justified.
“In Victoria, you wander down Pandora Street, it's very scary. I don't know that you're actually going to be assaulted necessarily. But it is scary for people. It drives people away. It makes staff fearful. You never know what someone is going to do.
“The overdose prevention site I think has become a symbol to some extent of social and health policies that do not appear to be working. And symbols, as you know, are important.”
In Victoria, Coun. Marg Gardiner proposed a motion early in July to ask Island Health to close a supervised consumption site called The Harbour, on problem-plagued Pandora Avenue, which is like a smaller version of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
It too was deferred until more information could be gathered from Island Health.
Victoria Police Chief Del Manak said his officers found a drug dealer sitting on a chair right in front of the entrance to the taxpayer-funded site, openly selling and dealing illegal drugs without consequence. Not only that, staff at the site were talking to the drug dealer and doing nothing about it, he said.
“Our surveillance also showed that there were staff that were coming in and out from the supervised consumption site and engaging with this individual,” Manak told CBC. “We just can't have that. There has to be a better deterrence. We have to be better.”
Premier David Eby defended the overdose prevention and supervised consumption drug sites when asked this week, saying his government is always willing to discuss their impact on communities and work with neighbours.
But that’s not what municipalities, or police, are seeing back in reality.
Instead, Island Health issued a statement saying it is not responsible for what occurs outside of its drug sites.
“It is not within the mandate or purview of a health authority or its staff to respond to potential criminal activity occurring on a public street–that is within the purview of law enforcement,” the Provincial Health Services Authority said in a statement.
So the province authorizes drug consumption sites, reassures the public there won’t be any impact on safety, and then wipes its hands of the drug dealing, crime and street disorder that proliferates around the sites because it’s happening on municipal sidewalks? All while the premier claims he’s willing to listen to municipalities, who are shouting at the top of their lungs for his government to change direction?
“I speak for all mayors across this province when I say this, and all councils, we're all getting frustrated, we're getting tired, we’re saddened,” said Krog.
All with good reason.
Rob Shaw has spent more than 17 years covering B.C. politics, now reporting for CHEK News and writing for The Orca/BIV. He is the co-author of the national bestselling book A Matter of Confidence, host of the weekly podcast Political Capital, and a regular guest on CBC Radio.
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