MAYOR JIM WATSON’S DODGE ON INJECTION SITES WILL SAVE LIVES
Letting the city’s board of health take the key vote on whether Ottawa should have supervised injection sites lets Mayor Jim Watson save face as he retreats from the wrong position on the issue. Fine. Whatever works. The Sandy Hill Community Health Centre is filing its application to add a space in its building at Rideau and Nelson streets for hard-drug addicts to shoot up. They already visit the centre for treatment and supports and to exchange needles. Now instead of going out again to use their drugs, they’ll have a clean indoor place to do it, with professionals on hand if they overdose.
The application, a thick book of papers required by federal law to get an exemption from anti-drug laws, includes a letter from Watson saying city council’s opinion on a supervised injection site is whatever Ottawa’s board of health’s opinion is. The board of health, an 11-member body appointed by city council, has six councillors on it but also five experts in different facets of health care and policy — a doctor, a psychologist, the executive director of the Ottawa Mission, and so on. It voted early last summer, overwhelmingly, in support of the idea of supervised injection sites, with some work to be done on the details.
The health unit’s staff, led by Dr. Isra Levy, had studied the issue for months. Levy is convinced that a wave of street overdoses is coming. Powdered fentanyl, an opiate like heroin or OxyContin but with a much smaller difference between a “normal” dose and a deadly one, is wreaking havoc in cities like Vancouver already and is popping up here, and even addicts aren’t ready for its dangers. Watson disagrees. “Call me old-fashioned, but I’m still not convinced that having a storefront operation encouraging people to come and do something bad for their health is a good idea. But people much wiser in the medical field than I believe this is going to save lives,” Watson says. The board of health is the right body to make the decision, he says.
Some, including the editorial board of this newspaper, disagree, but Watson knows his history.
In 2008, city council cancelled an $8,000-a-year public-health program that gave away clean glass pipes to crack smokers.
The city’s chief public-health officer at the time, Dr. David Salisbury, estimated it saved a dozen people a year from contracting HIV by putting dirty shared pipes to their cracked and blistered lips. Then council asked him to study restricting the distribution of clean needles, which he thought would lead to more deaths. He was so exasperated that he quit — he was a doctor, he said, not a politician.
The provincial government, of which Watson was then a member, picked up the $8,000 cost so the crackpipe program could continue.
Not screwing up if such a question came up again is exactly why we have a board of health.
“A couple of years ago we made the right choice to ask the provincial government for legislation to create the board of health to take the politics out of health decisions because I had seen, as minister of health promotion, and I had seen as an MPP lots of decisions that were politically motivated that had to do with the health and wellbeing of our citizens,” Watson says. “It would be rather hypocritical, all of a sudden — we asked for this, we get it, we implement it, and by the way when an issue comes up that we’d like to take a crack at, we pull it away from their mandate.”
Watson isn’t really a jokester so the pun is probably unintentional.
The city government isn’t planning to run a supervised injection site. It’s not being asked to fund a supervised injection site. It’s being asked for its views on letting other people run supervised injection sites. Councillors don’t need to do anything but get out of the way.
Yes, punting to the health board lets Watson have it both ways on the issue. He can say he objects to supervised injection sites but profess helplessness as they go ahead, in keeping with what two polls now have said most Ottawans want. City council won’t have to be courageous. But so what? It lets the mayor retreat from the wrong position and — the important part — allow lives to be preserved.
If that’s as far as the politicians will permit themselves to be pushed on the issue, it’s far enough.
Dr. Isra Levy is convinced that a wave of street overdoses is coming.