Calgary city council just says no

A motion pushed on city council "by a Rick Bell column," asking the UCP government to shut down Calgary's only supervised consumption site, was shot down by city council on Wednesday evening.

Multiple councillors described the motion and the discussion around it as a "trap" set by the Alberta government and its political allies, to force them to open the conversation about whether or not the supervised consumption site and associated services that make up Safeworks even belong in the city.

This would have followed a pattern set by Red Deer last winter, when a city council motion brought forth after apparent provincial meddling resulted in the self-described "City of Recovery" calling for the provincial government to close its only supervised consumption site.

Despite being baited, however, Calgary councillors didn't get stuck in the trap, instead pushing any decisions about the site back on the Province. In doing so, they avoided doing the government's dirty work – it has long plotted to close the site – and identified some common aggressors in the public debate.

Among them, Airbnb owners operating short-term rental properties in the vicinity of Safeworks. Last year, journalist Ximena Gonzales revealed that a longtime advocate against the site, Geoff Allan, who also co-owns and operates Bottlescrew Bill's Pub and Buzzards Restaurant and Bar, runs Airbnb properties immediately adjacent to Safeworks. Allan appears to leverage his position as co-administrator of Airbnb's local host club to influence civic politics to the advantage of short-term rental operators, and has used that position to attack the site.

Short-term rentals have long been identified as both a contributing factor of soaring house prices and a reason why people are squeezed out of the rental market. With around 5% of long-term rental stock now dedicated to short-term rentals, people are being pushed into houselessness by housing speculation. Worse still, evidence suggests increased crime in areas with high short-term rental density – a problem not shared with supervised consumption sites. You'd never know it, to hear the political rhetoric.

The visible poverty and disorder many people whine about in downtown cores across the country, it turns out, is made worse by the rent-seeking of the loudest whiners.

Councillors step up

The most powerful speeches of the night were made by Courtney Walcott, Councillor for Ward 8, where Safeworks is located. Walcott suggested at one point that council was only discussing the closure of the site in the first place "because of a Rick Bell article – and it's irresponsible to be taking it this far." This followed Councillor Jasmine Mian's statement that city councillors shouldn't make healthcare decisions – that she felt city council was being "baited" into the debate.

This turned the tide of the conversation. Councillors previously waffling about small adjustments to be made to the motion's wording were now focused on the trap they'd walked into. They were eager to back out of it and grateful to be shown the way.

Councillor Jennifer Wyness had taken a particular interest in getting educated about the site, and reached out to Safeworks for a tour. In perhaps the first such instance, Safeworks refused her request. It remains unknown who was behind that refusal. Nonetheless, Wyness and other councillors dedicated time to consulting with local experts. In the debate, she even brought up the perennially under-discussed point that lacking inhalation capacity, Safeworks is not meeting its site users' needs.

Indeed, inhalation now outpaces injection drug use by a wide margin in Alberta. Services need to keep up, not shut down.

Mian had significantly gutted McLean's original motion, rewording it to demand heavily suppressed outcome data for the Province's abstinence-based system. All the same, she encouraged her colleagues to vote against her motion and throw the decision about the site back at the feet of the Province, where it belongs.

With a red-faced McLean sputtering about an unfair process, the vote went 9-5 against Mian's amended motion.

Councillor Gian-Carlo Carra appeared to vote in favour of the motion on the basis that he saw an opportunity to steer the discussion around "social disorder" and drug poisoning toward a greater evidence basis. While risky, the logic makes sense: if the mayor's letter to the Province highlighted the countless areas the Alberta government is manipulating and suppressing data about its "recovery-oriented system of care" (aka abstinence-oriented war on drugs), then it could help the public understand the ways their government has been commercializing this area of public health.

Impressively, Councillors Mian and Walcott both made clear that they would welcome new supervised consumption sites into their wards as public health measures. For Walcott, this comes as little surprise – after all, Ward 8 already houses Safeworks and would have housed both overdose prevention sites initially planned to replace Safeworks, after the UCP's first attempt to shut the site.

But for Mian, who governs a ward in Calgary's deep north, this was a courageous statement that signals a potential shift away from the flimsy support that progressive politicians have been willing to offer such desperately value public health sites.

Whether her offer will be followed with action remains to be seen.

The most impassioned moment in the debate came again from Councillor Walcott. He looked around the room at his colleagues who had been discussing "their constituents" for over an hour: their constituents who own houses, who rent, who have a roof over their heads. Nobody was talking about their constituents who don't. When someone loses their job or can't make rent, are they suddenly non-citizens? Do they not deserve the same access and consideration for safety and healthcare as everyone else?

It was exactly the sort of message that councillors should be practiced in delivering to the ears of their constituents – all constituents.

Implications for the mayoral race

It seems the city is doomed to another fight for the centre-right, with police the beating heart of policymaking. But what would hold considerably more value for the city's long-term economics and politics is a viable mayoral candidate stepping up and declaring, with all the evidence in hand: more police do not make us safer.

It's asking for trouble. After all, Vancouver's police union likely tipped the scales for Ken Sim in 2022. Alberta's police chiefs may have done the same for the UCP in 2023.

But so far, what we're hearing from those entering the race is more cops, more escalation. More attempts to disappear poverty, instead of reduce it. These aren't evidence-based, compassionate, or fiscally responsible. They have more in common with racist land occupation, no matter who promotes them.

And we have to ask after all that, where is this city's mayoral candidate who will stand up to defend the real people that make up this city – not its institutions, its badges, its fixations and prairie settler paranoias? Who will leverage the impact that a leader's words have on how citizens view themselves?

That person was there tonight, leading his council colleagues in informed debate. With any luck, mayoral hopefuls were taking notes.

Drug Data Decoded provides analysis on topics related to prohibitionist drug policy using news sources, publicly available data sets and freedom of information submissions, from which the author draws reasonable opinions. The author is not a journalist.