Pierre Poilievre spouts 'uneducated' opinions on safe consumption sites: Prairie Harm Reduction

The executive director of a Saskatoon-based harm reduction group says federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s statements on supervised consumption sites are “uneducated.”

Poilievre has recently referred to the sites as “drug dens” that a Conservative government would seek to close and not provide “a single taxpayer dollar.”

“As public health advocates and experts, we find it essential to correct these misconceptions and highlight the critical role that safe consumption sites play in harm reduction and community health,” the executive director of Prairie Harm Reduction (PHR) said in a news release on Tuesday.

Prairie Harm Reduction's safe consumption site in Saskatoon is pictured Sept. 30, 2020.

The sites are intended to prevent overdoses by allowing people to bring their drugs to use under the observation of trained staff. 

For drug users, the sites also provide access to clean supplies to reduce the transmission rates of HIV and other diseases, and offer referrals to people seeking treatment options.

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“It is there to engage people, to bring them off the street, and put them in a situation where they're not trying to hide and not at risk of sharing equipment or being alone if they overdose,” Kayla DeMong, executive director of PHR, said in an interview with CTV News.

During a visit to a park near a supervised consumption site in Montreal on July 12, Poilievre said he would shut all locations near schools, playgrounds and "anywhere else that they endanger the public."

Poilievre believes "reasonable restrictions" can be put in place to prevent sites from opening "in locations that endanger the community, or where there is community opposition."

"Radical bureaucrats don't have the right to open these drug dens anywhere they want," he said.

DeMong said it’s important to put a site where people already are. She said other cities have struggled to move sites to different areas.

“They were moved to different neighborhoods where people weren't there, and then everybody came there, and so it created a lot of issues with businesses, policing, all of those things, because those resources aren’t in that neighborhood,” she said.

She said the site has saved thousands of dollars in health care costs.

“When we looked at our overdose numbers for 2023 and so far in 2024, and the average cost of an ambulance call out being about $325, when you do the math, we're at $36,000 that we've been able to save just on ambulance calls,” DeMong said.

“If they're [not] going into the hospital, there's no nursing, doctors, resources being spent there. It's not taking up space or beds that are already limited.”

DeMong notes the federal government does not currently contribute funds to supervised consumption sites.

-With Canadian Press files