No ‘unanimous’ message on injection sites

Political unity can be elusive.

The harder you work to catch it, the more slippery it gets.

“Let’s come out of this as a unanimous council. That’s all I’m asking,” Cambridge Mayor Doug Craig told city council on Tuesday night. “Don’t split on this.”

Naturally, the council split. The vote was 8-1 in favour of a resolution from council essentially calling on the region, as it fights the ongoing opioids overdose crisis, to keep any supervised drug injection site out of the Galt, Preston and Hespeler cores.

The vote wasn’t the 9-0 slam dunk the mayor and other councillors desperately sought because of an amendment brought up by Coun. Nicholas Ermeta. The original motion only protected the Galt core, since south Cambridge has been identified as a hot spot for opioid overdose calls by a study.

Ermeta added in protection for Cambridge’s two other downtowns, also deemed too small to comfortably host such safe injection sites.

Coun. Frank Monteiro, who visited such sites in other cities, didn’t think Preston and Hespeler cores needed to be part of the amendment because the problem the region’s public health department is trying to address is centred in south Cambridge. He also saw their inclusion as working against the effort to protect the Galt core from hosting such a site.

“This final decision is going to be made by the region, although we are trying to get them to listen to us,” Monteiro said.

“But if we make new obstacles, I’m afraid that, at the end of the day, we won’t have a say at all, if we put too many obstacles.”

So Monteiro voted against the amendment, which carried 8-1.

Another vote on the altered resolution, the city clerk ruled, was unnecessary since the vote was in favour. So the 8-1 count also applied to the main motion.

“It is very, very, very important that we leave here tonight, each and every one of us, with a vote of 9-0,” Coun. Mike Devine said before the vote.

“We don’t need a split on the amendment and then a split on the main motion.”

But that’s exactly what they got as they sent their supervised injection site wishes, less than unanimously approved, on to the region.

“We’re just fighting over technicalities,” Coun. Shannon Adshade said.

In that sense, the mayor believes that council’s stance on where such sites should not located in Cambridge should still be considered a unanimous statement.

“Yes, it was about splitting hairs,” Craig said in an email to The Record on Wednesday. “Nothing else should be read into it.”

Meanwhile, another recent unanimous decision by councillors took a hit on Tuesday night.

Coun. Pam Wolf registered her opposition to council’s March 6 decision to disregard a staff report calling for naturalization of the Speed River though Riverside Park.

Wolf was away on a longplanned vacation with her granddaughters when council’s general committee voted 8-0 to work toward rebuilding or replacing the beloved, but crumbling Riverside Park dam.

“I need to stand up for what I believe to be the right decision,” said Wolf, who favours naturalizing the Speed River through the park. “And let people know that rebuilding the dam was not a unanimous vote.”

Tuesday’s followup vote at full council went down as an 8-1 victory for the dam.