When is a safe injecting room site not a safe injecting room site? According to the Canadian Tories, it may well be because they want to try to bribe Quebec over to the dark blue side of Canadian politics at their next general election.

Contrary to the furore in Ottawa and Vancouver when the federal Tories fought the British Columbian Liberal provincial government over the status of the Insite safe injecting room facility a few months ago, the federal Tories have been quite as churchmice over Montreal’s plans to open several similar supervised IV drug injection facilities in their capital city. Historically, Quebec’s francophone status means that it has traditionally been very assertive about its independence from Ottawa (which isn’t so bad for Quebecois LGBTs because Quebec is a liberal place anyway).

Prohibitionist Health Minister Tony Clements is strangely quiet over the plans of Quebec’s federal public health director Alain Poirier, although the measure did bring some opposition from the Canadian Addiction Counsellors Certification Federation , which also supports mandatory drug abstinence as the only option to ‘uncontrollable’ addiction. This is at odds with the British Columbian Supreme Court, which has found that denial of a safe injecting room constitutes an attack on the “life, liberty and security” of Vancouver Downtown Eastside IV drug users who attend the facility.

While this has been questioned by conservative Canadian columnists like the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente,  who see it as conferring a Charters of Rights and Freedom “right to drug abuse”, others have applauded the decision as evidence-based public health against prohibitionist ideology.

One awaits the outcome with interest.

Recommended:

Jonathan Montpetit: “Montreal plans own safe injecting room facility” Globe and Mail: 17.07.08: http://www.theglobeandmail.com