During a campaign stop in Campbell River on Friday, NDP leader David Eby admitted his government’s drug decriminalization project was a failure.
“We did try decriminalization, out of desperation trying to keep people alive, give them a chance to get into treatment,” he said. “We stood with all the parties in the legislature, as well as with police chiefs, and it didn’t have the results we wanted to see, just the opposite. It resulted in some real problems.”
Eby says the NDP have since changed course to provide supportive housing, and to put people into involuntary care so they can break the cycles of addiction.
“With hard problems like this, sometimes you have to try different things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t,” he said. “But the commitment is, we’re going to keep going until the job is done. We’ve opened hundreds of new treatment spaces just down the road at Orca Lelum, treatment spaces for Indigenous youth, to make sure they have the chance for recovery, to rebuild their lives.”
Orca Lelum is in Nanoose Bay.
He said his government funded new supportive housing and complex care housing, and is now moving to put people who don’t fit anywhere else into involuntary care.
“For people who have failed out of that [supportive] housing we’re moving now to secure involuntary care for people, to make sure that they’re safe, and also that the broader community is safe,” he said. “We’ll make sure that there is space on the North Island to provide that kind of care for people as well.”
Campbell River was the first community in BC to push back against the decriminalization of illicit drugs with an attempt to ban them in public places with a bylaw in early 2023, and other municipalities later followed suit. However, a legal challenge by the Pivot Legal Society, where Eby worked from 2005-2008, forced the city rescind the bylaw.
In July 2023, the city passed a revised bylaw that went unchallenged, and allowed city bylaw officers to educate people about the places where they could and could not use drugs, and direct them to appropriate locations.
On October 2023, the province announced it would be introducing legislation across BC that would restrict illicit drug use in public places. Later that month, Campbell River made provincial news again after a 13-year-old overdosed inside the Dairy Queen restaurant.
In March of this year, spurred on by complaints from downtown businesses, the city took first steps to declare the overdose prevention site on Dogwood Street as a public nuisance, but were able to work with the society which operates it to mitigate problems without making the declaration.
In May this year, the province reinstated the ban against using illicit drugs in public.
