The Manitoba government announced Friday it will open the province’s first supervised consumption site in 2025 in an effort to save lives from mounting overdose deaths.
It’s news harm reductionists – people who try to reduce levels of harm associated with risky activities – have been waiting for after years of lobbying the province for safer places for people to use drugs.
Housing, Addictions and Homelessness Minister Bernadette Smith said while a location still has to be worked out it will be somewhere in the downtown area.
“We had over 400 deaths [last year] in our province,” Smith told a news conference. “We have no supervised consumption site.
“We’re coming from a Conservative [provincial] government for the last seven and a half years that didn’t take a harm-reduction approach, and we’re listening to community and this is what community has asked for.”
The Manitoba government will provide $727,000 for the site and partner with the Aboriginal Health and Wellness Centre (AHWC), which has been providing healthcare services to the Indigenous community in Winnipeg for more 30 years, to lead it.
It will be the first Indigenous-led supervised consumption site, or SCS, in Canada, said Smith.
Monica Cyr, AHWC’s senior director for clinical operations, says it’s an important distinction.
“We know that the large concentration of folks who are impacted [by drug overdose deaths] are Indigenous,” said Cyr. “It’s about taking care of one another.
“We know how to do that, we know how to care and love our relatives because they are our relatives.”
Smith says the site will be for more than just drug consumption.
“This is about accessing primary healthcare,” she added, “getting folks connected with services such as housing, such as EIA [employment income assistance], counselling supports, whether they want to get into treatment.”
The service will be integrated with the provincial mental health and addiction system, the minister said.
“In Canada, we lose 22 people a day to opioid toxicity,” said Dr. Camisha Mayes, medical director for AHWC and medical lead for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority Addictions Services. “Consumption sites provide a supervised environment where individuals can use drugs under the watchful eye of trained staff who can intervene in the event of an overdose.”
The creation of the SCS will involve input from community members, including those who use drugs, reporters were told.
Cody Guimond is a peer advisor with lived experience using drugs who hopes the site will save lives.
“I’m losing friends every single day to it,” said Guimond. “I just lost a handful within the past couple days. So I think the safe consumption site is needed right now.”
Earlier Friday, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre said he would close some “drug dens” – SCS – and not fund new ones if he is elected prime minister.
Smith (MLA Point Douglas) says Manitoba intends to move forward.
“We’ve heard strongly from the community here in Manitoba that it is something that needs to happen,” she said.
