The Safeworks site, which is housed in the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre, provides a hygienic environment for people to use drugs under medical supervision. A sanitation worker makes their rounds just outside the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre in downtown Calgary on May 2.Louis Oliver/The Globe and Mail
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says she wants to host town halls in Calgary to determine the future of the city’s only supervised drug-use site after the municipal government voted not to take an official position on whether it should remain open.
City council had a robust debate on the site late last month with Mayor Jyoti Gondek and several other councillors arguing that health falls exclusively under provincial jurisdiction and it was unfair for the government to pass the buck on such a contentious issue. Alberta Addictions Minister Dan Williams criticized local leaders for supporting the status quo.
But it was the Alberta government, three years ago, that announced it would shutter the Safeworks site and replace it with two others elsewhere in the city. Two social agencies, Alpha House and the Calgary Drop-In Centre, walked away from proposals in 2022 to operate alternate sites. Since then, the province has yet to detail any other solution to follow-through on its closure plan.
“I’d be happy to do a town hall so that we can hear directly from you about the impact that the Sheldon Chumir Centre is having and that would give us the best feedback that we have about whether that site should be closed,” said Ms. Smith in response to a concern raised last weekend by a United Conservative Party member at their annual general meeting.
Safeworks is housed in the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre, which offers a range of health services including emergency care, in downtown Calgary. Ms. Smith said the government’s goal is that “recovery comes first.”
Mr. Williams, in a letter sent to Ms. Gondek in early October, asked for council’s input to transition services away from the Safeworks site into recovery-oriented care. The mayor, during the debate on Oct. 30, said it was “garbage” that city council was even debating a motion on the issue. “If we don’t push back against the provincial government to do their job themselves, they’ll never do it,” she said.
The Safeworks site provides a hygienic environment for people to use drugs under medical supervision. Health care staff have responded to roughly 8,000 overdoses – the majority of which have required life-saving interventions such as naloxone and oxygen – since it opened its doors in October, 2017. There have been no deaths on site.
Advocates for the service have argued that it is a critical resource to address the drug toxicity crisis as an average four Albertans die daily from drug overdoses. But political leaders across the country have struggled to balance this position with concerns felt by some residents and business owners in surrounding areas who have voiced concerns about crime, social disorder and public safety.
The UCP government has hosted town halls on the topic of supervised drug-use sites in the past. A report, released under former premier Jason Kenney, which included the feedback, found that the sites were contributing to deteriorating public safety. Some academics and addiction experts slammed the review as a partisan experiment that lacked objective and scientific evidence.
The Ontario government, in August, shut down more than half of its existing sites, which Premier Doug Ford said had become the “worst thing that could ever happen to a community.”
Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said he would pull funding from all supervised consumption sites in favour of addiction recovery programs if his party is elected to government. He called the sites “drug dens” and chastised Ottawa for “encouraging drug addiction.”
The Liberal government, in response, acknowledged that there are legitimate concerns about these sites but said Mr. Poilievre was weaponizing the issue “to incite fear.” The Alberta government has been accused by its political opponents and harm reduction advocates of doing the same and for ignoring input from addictions experts who stress that more people will die if these sites close.