NDP trying to solve the problem, Tories just want it to go away

It’s all so predictable and disheartening.

This week, the opposition Progressive Conservatives tabled a series of amendments to a bill that would give the province the ability to hold people suffering from addictions for up to 72 hours at a detox facility to be established at 190 Disraeli Fwy., on the northern edge of the Exchange District.

According to legislative rules, each of the amendments would require debate, and that would delay the passage and proclamation of this law by Saturday, the government’s self-imposed deadline for the commencement of sobering detention.

Quite frankly, missing the deadline won’t prove to be that big a deal. Given the NDP’s majority in the legislature, the facility will open in the near future after the new law allowing for three days of medically supervised detention is enacted.

The greater concern is that, once again, we are confronted by the dangerously misguided and hilariously misinformed forces who want to block the NDP government’s every attempt to provide critically necessary treatment and shelter.

Opponents of the NDP’s plans — which include some people who live downtown in fairly close proximity to the proposed facility — are making heroic attempts to frame the blockages as some sort of perverse effort to improve public safety.

This is the playbook they used earlier this year to derail NDP plans to use the same building for a safe drug consumption site.

The strategy reads like this: to make them safer, critics will cite the need to keep detox centres, supervised drug consumption sites and mobile overdose prevention vehicles away from, well… virtually everyone and everything.

What the opponents can’t or won’t do is propose an alternative. If these services cannot be offered in the building identified by the province, where else can they be provided?

The PC amendments are a particularly good example of this half-baked mindset: a prohibition of any addictions treatment or consumption site within 500 metres of a school, child-care centre, personal-care home, playground, park or community centre. They have also proposed that North End non-profit resource centre Sunshine House’s mobile supervised consumption vehicle be kept at least a half-kilometre away from 190 Disraeli.

Tory housing, addictions and homeless critic Jeff Bereza — the MLA for Portage la Prairie — passionately defended the amendments as a way of protecting citizens from people who may be in a “state” from the use of drugs — particularly methamphetamine.

“We want to make sure that there is enough space so that they can’t be harmful to somebody else in the area. If my grandma is living that close, you know, do we really want it that close?”

If Bereza’s grandma lives in the East Exchange — which I highly doubt — she would tell her grandson to not worry about detox or safe consumption sites or vehicles attracting addicts because they are already present in abundance in that core area neighbourhood.

You could write off this kind of flawed logic as ignorance, or even intellectual dishonesty. The opponents may understand the proposals would make things safer but they still don’t want to be near it.

But arguing against the provision of services to the vulnerable in the neighbourhood where they already live is one of the most confounding aspects of this debate.

Homelessness, addiction and mental illness most definitely undermine public safety. But if those people are already present and compromising public safety in a particular neighbourhood, what possible good will it do to provide less support?

Although it seems almost unimaginable, the PCs and the community opponents of these plans are implicitly demanding that those people be relocated to some other area of the city. It’s hard to envision what area that would be; the Tory proposals limit eligible sites to shopping mall parking lots and rail yards.

At some point, aggrieved area residents and political opponents are going to have to accept the inescapable reality that the Exchange District, along with most of downtown, is a place where vulnerable people congregate.

The East Exchange neighbourhood that is ground zero for the battles over sobering and safe consumption facilities is already a hub of social services for the vulnerable. The province is working slowly but steadily to house the homeless, an effort that should provide some relief in the long term.

However, in the short term, there is a population living downtown that needs mental-health and addictions help and expecting them to bus their way to an industrial park in order to get it is completely unreasonable.

Strip away all the political hyperbole and it is fair to say the goal of the NDP government’s efforts to establish safe consumption and detox facilities are, ultimately, to make everyone safer.

The facilities that have been proposed for the building at the foot of the Disraeli Freeway will save lives and put the vulnerable in direct contact with social, health and housing supports. That not only makes them safer, it makes the neighbourhood in which the facility is located safer.

What these facilities cannot do is satisfy community and political opponents who only want the problem to go away, without any concern about where it goes.

Just as long as it isn’t near them.

dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com