MP Dianne Watts has written to White Rock city council soliciting the city’s support in a campaign to amend C-37, a bill that makes it easier to create safe drug-injection sites.
“Currently Bill C-37 allows for the placement of a drug-injection site in your municipality without consultation with you, your administration, local law enforcement or the community,” states the South Surrey-White Rock MP’s letter to mayor and council, which was received last week. “To me, this is unacceptable. It is unfathomable to me such a community-altering decision like a drug-injection site could be located in our community without consultation.”
The letter was dated April 12, before the senate added amendments to Bill C-37 that would require a consultation process, mandate a community advisory committee and require sites to offer pharmaceutical options before clients used their drugs.
Bill C-37 was approved last Thursday.
The government voted to keep a consultation process, remove the community advisory committee aspect and scrap the requirement of offering pharmaceutical options at the sites.
“We have to make sure wherever these consumption sites are sited that there is community input and involvement,” Watts told Peace Arch News May 18, three days after council formally received her letter.
“If the community doesn’t work with the operators of the facility, then it can certainly become problematic.”
Watts said she’s neither for or against drug injection sites.
“If that is something that will stop people from dying – especially with the fentanyl crisis that we’re seeing predominately in British Columbia but all across Canada – then there has to be some measures around that and how that is going to work in the community.”
Watts said she supports the treatment aspect of the legislation and wants to see more education for parents and children.
In her letter to council, Watts notes there are positive elements within Bill C-37, “such as increased authority and powers to CBSA to search and seize suspect packages, unregistered pill presses and other devices.”
Watts’ Conservative party introduced a motion Feb. 1 to split Bill C-37 into two bills. This was done, she writes, to allow a “fulsome” debate on the appropriateness of consultation for injection sites.
The motion was defeated.
In her letter, Watts encourages city council to write to Health minister Jane Philpott, requesting her to split Bill C-37.