{"id":48857,"date":"2026-05-17T10:37:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T10:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/48857\/"},"modified":"2026-05-17T10:37:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T10:37:10","slug":"adam-zivo-b-c-ndp-forcing-unwanted-ruinous-injection-site-on-vancouver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/48857\/","title":{"rendered":"Adam Zivo: B.C. NDP forcing unwanted, ruinous injection site on Vancouver"},"content":{"rendered":"

The B.C. NDP wants to reopen an infamously mismanaged Vancouver-based supervised consumption site despite opposition<\/a> from the local mayor and city council. Not only is the province acting undemocratically, such sites have been shown to fuel crime and do not actually save lives.<\/p>\n

This controversy began earlier this month, when Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), a provincial health authority,\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0that it had\u00a0acquired\u00a0a new permanent downtown location for its Thomas Donaghy Overdose Prevention Site (TDOPS), which is expected to resume operations within the coming weeks.<\/p>\n

The TDOPS was originally located in Vancouver\u2019s Yaletown\u00a0neighbourhood, but local residents\u00a0sued the site\u2019s operators<\/a>, alleging that their \u201cham-fisted\u201d management had\u00a0fuelled\u00a0drug trafficking, public disorder, assaults and vandalism. The lawsuit\u00a0ultimately ended\u00a0in\u00a0an\u00a0out-of-court settlement<\/a>\u00a0wherein the province committed to better respecting its minimum public safety standards.<\/p>\n

The city\u00a0declined to renew TDOPS\u2019s lease<\/a>\u00a0in 2024, while the lawsuit was ongoing, citing public safety issues. Shortly afterwards, the consumption site\u00a0relocated\u00a0to another building slightly outside of Yaletown, where it continued to attract\u00a0neighbourhood\u00a0complaints. The new building owner then\u00a0asked it to vacate<\/a> this January, after less than two years of tenancy \u2014 perhaps the province\u2019s commitments to guaranteeing minimum standards were just hot air.<\/p>\n

That brings us to the current reopening: new location; same operator; no clear argument for why things will be different this time.<\/p>\n

In response to TDOPS\u2019s announced second revival, Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim\u00a0forwarded an \u201curgent\u201d motion<\/a>\u00a0directing city staff to \u201cuse all tools available to the city\u201d to block the opening of\u00a0all new supervised consumption sites \u2014 not just this one \u2014 unless they provide detailed proposals that include \u201cmeaningful consultation, a clear public safety strategy, defined recovery pathways, and transparent accountability measures.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have seen the disastrous impact when OPS sites are introduced without the right planning, oversight, and accountability,\u201d wrote Sim in an associated news release.<\/p>\n

The motion passed with unanimous support from Sim\u2019s ruling ABC\u00a0Party, but\u00a0was rejected by all opposition\u00a0councillors. Yet, the province has made it clear that it intends to reopen TDOPS regardless of municipal opposition, as it sees consumption sites as a\u00a0form of evidence-based health care<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for the B.C. NDP, though, there is compelling data showing that these sites do not save lives and actually fuel crime.<\/p>\n

Notably, a\u00a0recent peer-reviewed study<\/a>\u00a0published in\u00a0Addiction, an academic journal, examined the impacts of closing a supervised consumption site in Red Deer, Alberta, by comparing municipal health outcomes with Lethbridge, a\u00a0demographically-similar\u00a0Albertan city whose consumption site remained open.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0study found<\/a>\u00a0that former clients of the Red Deer consumption site saw no statistically significant increase in deaths, emergency department visits or \u201copioid-related emergency medical services (EMS) events\u201d compared to the clients of the Lethbridge site. In fact, uptake of opioid agonist therapy (i.e.\u00a0evidence-based addiction treatments such as methadone) markedly increased after the closure of the Red Deer site was announced.<\/p>\n

The only apparent negative effect, according to the study, was an increase in overnight, non-emergency hospitalizations \u2014 which could suggest that former Red Deer clients used hospitals to access health services that had previously been provided by the consumption site.<\/p>\n

The closure of several of Ontario\u2019s supervised consumption sites last year has also been illuminating. Although harm reduction activists predicted that their loss would cause mass deaths, fatal opioid overdoses and drug-related mortality\u00a0have not risen<\/a>\u00a0and remain far below levels seen in previous years.<\/p>\n

What about crime, though?<\/p>\n

A\u00a0preliminary study<\/a> published by medRxiv in late 2024, which used publicly available online crime data from the Toronto Police Service, found that crime increased within 100 metres of the city\u2019s supervised consumption sites \u2014 assaults and robberies increased by 61 and 62 per cent, respectively, for example. These impacts were less dramatic within a 200 and 500 radius, though, suggesting that crime increases were limited to the immediate vicinity of the sites and that including farther areas in the study\u2019s measurements diluted these effects.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the study authors, who are harm reduction advocates,\u00a0more or less republished\u00a0their results\u00a0in JAMA<\/a>\u00a0in late 2025 using only a 400-radius measure, in what some\u00a0might perceive<\/a> as an attempt to omit unfavourable results. They then used their reformulated data to claim that supervised consumption sites do not cause\u00a0crime, and\u00a0were rewarded with a shower of media coverage from\u00a0credulous journalists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Toronto\u2019s experience is consistent with\u00a0crime data<\/a> compiled by the Montreal police, which examined the impacts of a supervised consumption site that opened in the St. Henri neighbourhood in early 2024. Within a 250-metre radius around the site, mischief calls and crimes against people increased by 800 per cent and 93 per cent respectively.<\/p>\n

Some studies claim that supervised consumption sites work, but many of them are authored by harm reduction activist-scholars who use misleading methodologies.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0classic example<\/a> would be the original evaluations of InSite, Canada\u2019s first supervised injection site. Published in the mid-2000s, the study claimed that InSite created thousands of referrals to recovery and caused no increase in crime.<\/p>\n

Yet, a third party assessor hired by the RCMP in 2006 found<\/a> that these evaluations had misrepresented reality \u2014 first, by defining a \u201creferral\u201d as simply handing someone a brochure (even if a recipient immediately discarded the brochure, they were \u201creferred\u201d), and, second, by discounting how the Vancouver police redeployed enormous amounts of officers and resources around InSite to keep crime under control.<\/p>\n

Vancouver\u2019s municipal leaders know that supervised consumption sites are generally ruinous. It\u2019s too bad that the B.C. NDP wants to crush their democratic voice and double-down on failed experiments.<\/p>\n

National Post<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The B.C. NDP wants to reopen an infamously mismanaged Vancouver-based supervised consumption site despite opposition from the local…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48858,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[11842,11314,95,2265],"class_list":{"0":"post-48857","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-vancouver","8":"tag-jason-payne","9":"tag-supervised-consumption-site","10":"tag-vancouver","11":"tag-vancouver-coastal-health"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}