On October 29th, Calgary City Council will be forced to participate in a political process initiated by the Alberta UCP Government, introduced into our meeting through a Notice of Motion by Councillor Dan McLean. This discussion arises from a suggestion made by UCP Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, Dan Williams, as well as the Premiere, that Calgary City Council should determine whether Alberta Health Services’ supervised consumption site at the Sheldon Chumir Health Centre should continue operating.

There are two main reasons why I am characterizing this as a galling and deeply problematic approach.

Firstly, over recent years, there has been a noted shift in the relationship between Alberta’s provincial and municipal governments, reversing decades of progress that had increasingly recognized the importance of empowering local municipalities with greater decision-making authority and the rebalancing of roles, responsibilities, and capacities between the two levels of government.

Working with Calgary and Edmonton, both the PC and the NDP governments helped establish Alberta’s Big City Charters, which acknowledged the big cities as respected partners, and established a collaborative environment wherein both orders of government would discuss challenges and opportunities facing the community, agreeing on who best to take the lead, and how responses would be funded and enabled by legislation. Under Jason Kenny - and despite assurances to the contrary when he was seeking office - the Big City Charters were abandoned. Under Danielle Smith, we are witnessing even further undoing, wherein the provincial government is centralizing power in the Office of the Premiere and actively reducing the autonomy of municipalities.

In this specific case, the provincial government is now asking Calgary City Council to weigh in on an issue that is fundamentally a provincial responsibility. Operation of a supervised consumption site is deeply intertwined with our broader healthcare system, which the province oversees. It’s a decision that cannot be made in isolation and one that directly impacts the well-being of vulnerable individuals in our community and the broader systems of support they rely on. It is also a decision that is politically fraught, as it pits the comfort of a community directly against the desperate needs of our most vulnerable neighbours.

The second, and more significant, concern is that while the noxious dynamic of politics at the expense of governance is playing out on dozens of fronts - wasting hundreds of millions of Albertans’ tax dollars, undermining our reputation, and unraveling our quality of life - our vaunted Alberta Advantage - in this specific case it is literally a matter of life and death.

We are currently enduring a severe mental health and addictions crisis. I believe this crisis has its deep origins in the hollowing out of the social safety net that was the prevailing approach to government in western countries a generation ago - the effects of those decisions are generational, and we are now living in the aftermath. But there are many other factors: the criminal proliferation of opioids that made pharmaceutical companies billions while creating a new and unparalleled epidemic of addiction; the pipeline of a cheap synthetic opioid, fentanyl, both feeding this epidemic as well as killing people in heartbreaking numbers; the downturn in Calgary’s economy when the price of oil and gas bottomed out in 2014 that pushed many Calgarians off the rungs of our economic ladder; the severe economic and social shocks of the global pandemic; the politics of anger, fear, and division across the western world that has created a negative feedback loop, undermining faith in government while eroding governments’ ability to effectively govern; and, a severe housing and affordability crisis that is further destabilizing peoples’ ability to cling to the rungs of the economic ladder. All the while, deaths due to a toxic drug supply have continued at a devastating pace.

In the face of unprecedented fatalities, social disorder, and the trauma associated with these converging crises, a spectrum of responses has been developed by health, social, and policy experts. On the triage side of the spectrum are measures designed to keep people alive long enough to be helped in a more meaningful way. These triage responses – things like access to safe drug supply, supervised consumption spaces, decriminalization - are collectively called Harm Reduction. In the middle of the spectrum are recovery services where people are able to enter programs that help facilitate the arduous journey of withdrawal and detoxification and figure out ways to accommodate often permanent chemical dependencies as they transition back into a more healthy lifestyle. And finally, at the other end of the spectrum, are wrap around supports such as housing, job opportunities, mental health treatment, and other ongoing services to help navigate setbacks and resist relapses.

Rather than use and fund the whole spectrum of addiction care to help people, the province has outlined their work as recovery (the Alberta Model) and pitted it against harm reduction. The framing of this complex and nuanced crisis as an either/or solution is pure politics - no one working at any point in the addiction care spectrum views their work as the only solution. Robust investment and the full range of harm reduction, recovery services, and wrap-around social supports is the only way forward.

It has taken decades of trial and error to develop scientific rationales for these integrated responses. In this time, the crises have deepened and the funding to effectively enact the full spectrum of care, at a scale adequate to demand, has fallen further and further behind. So, while literal lives are at risk, it’s crucial that our decisions regarding addiction services be made with care, compassion, and a commitment to evidence-based solutions.

To be clear, shutting down the only supervised consumption site in Calgary will further push public drug use into the parks, alleyways, and public spaces of the Beltline. It will result in more overdoses, more fatal outcomes, and an increase in calls to emergency responders, exacerbating an already fraught (and costly) situation. If the last several years have shown us anything, it’s that having only one supervised consumption site in Calgary is not enough. It’s too concentrated, putting unnecessary strain on the surrounding community. We also know that addiction, drug use, and overdoses are occurring citywide - we need more supervised consumption services, not less.

In consideration of this, it is essential that we approach this issue with both the seriousness and compassion it deserves. Our focus must remain on implementing well-researched, evidence-based solutions that prioritize saving lives and addressing root causes, because we know the choices we make today will have lasting impacts on the well-being of our society going forward, and we cannot afford to let political motivations impede true, transformative progress.