People dying while Ford delays

RE: ‘SOFT APPROACH’ URGED FOR OVERDOSE PREVENTION SITE, SEPT. 5

Niagara’s acting Medical Officer of Health Dr. Mustafa Hirji is urging the public to use a “soft approach” to this issue. In my opinion, a soft approach may just lead to more deaths, more overdoses and lastly, more harm.

Harm reduction refers to “policies, programs and practices that aim to reduce the harms associated with the use of psychoactive drugs in people unable or unwilling to stop. The defining features are the focus on the prevention of harm, rather than on the prevention of drug use itself, and the focus on people who continue to use drugs”. (Harm reduction international, 2018). What about a soft approach supports harm reduction?

Members of our community are dying. Lets look at the accumulated evidence in Canada or the proven effectiveness of safe injection sites for the past 15 years and start saving lives. There are six to 15 overdoses per day in Niagara — this is a community problem.

Harm reduction cannot be watered down, as Dr. Hirji suggests. A safe injection site is not focused on “referring people to addiction treatment centres” or “providing interventions to get people off opioids.” The focus is to reduce harm, to save lives. We need to start focusing on people, not addiction.

Anger can be a motivating factor in fighting for change. The people of Niagara should be angry. We were ready to “set up shop,” we had the space, the oversight and a date! Safe injection sites have already saved lives. Drug users are just as much a part of our community as politicians, as educators, as cancer survivors, as seniors, etc. We owe them as much as we owe any other community member. I disagree with the “soft approach” Dr Hirji is suggesting.

I think its time we got angry, and take a hard approach!

LeeAnn Pocknell,

St. Catharines

Trump complicates talks

In Washington, D.C., Canada, led by Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, went back to resume discussion of NAFTA. By the end of the Labour Day weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump seemed to have a dispute with Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO.

Trumka is leader of a 12.5-million-member union, who voiced his opinion, stating the economies of the U.S., Canada and Mexico are all “integrated” and it would be “pretty hard to see how that would work without having Canada in the deal.”

This led to Trump lashing out on Twitter, claiming Trumka “represented his union poorly.” Freeland continues a “nodrama” approach to the negotiations.

With a deadline approaching since Mexico’s government will change Dec. 1, Trump and his tweets are not making negotiations easier.

Kayla Charrois,

St. Catharines

A false narrative RE: WORRIED ABOUT ALT-RIGHT? BE ANTI-RIGHT, AUG. 23

What seems to be the norm today is pushing the false narrative about conservatism. This is what the authors of the above column, university professors John Grant and Fiona MacDonald, are doing.

Conservatives condemn in the strongest terms fascism, white and other supremacists, neo-Nazis and any other hate or violence focused groups. Significant was that these two professors didn’t talk about Antifa, the extreme left group of violent masked criminals and cowards.

Fifteen years under Ontario Liberal premiers Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne silenced the conservative voice. The same thing is happening under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s extreme leftwing ideology with examples like “peoples kind” instead of “men kind” and the rejection of the summer jobs program to anyone who didn’t agree with Trudeau.

We have seen a totalitarian governing trend from liberals, provincially as well as federally. The left and media are justifying their name calling by accusing conservatives of racism and intolerance if they dare to disagree. The Liberals’ gender identity politics and political correctness is there to silence conservatives and discriminate against the silent majority.

Rob Janssen,

Lincoln