BC government ministers offered their best strained smiles Tuesday when federal officials announced a plan to decriminalize personal possession of small amounts of drugs, like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines.
It was a historic announcement, for sure — but also one that fell far short of what the BC government had originally requested.
It also carried with it the unmistakable whiff of political opportunism, coming the day before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government was set to vote down a federal NDP MP’s private members’ bill to make decriminalization national across the country and was desperately seeking some good news cover.
BC Mental Health and Addictions Minister Sheila Malcolmson called the decision a “major step in changing how we view addiction and drug use in BC.”
“It reflects our view that substance use is a public health issue, not a criminal one,” she said.
Ottawa ignores BC’s suggestions
Malcolmson spent time at the announcement thanking the “diverse group” of people who for months helped BC craft its application for decriminalization, which was submitted to Ottawa last October. That included 19 organizations at its core planning table, such as “indigenous partners, people with lived experience, health and social service providers, municipalities, law enforcement, advocacy organizations, and clinical and research experts to craft our decriminalization framework,” she said.
“Our core planning table undertook the courageous work to bring many disparate interests together and create a broad consensus on the vast majority of the application,” added Malcolmson.
An impressive group. It’s too bad Ottawa couldn’t be bothered to listen to them. Nor could it seem to stomach adopting the made-in-BC report without needlessly watering it down.
Ottawa lowers BC’s amount
BC had requested a 4.5 gram cumulative limit of illicit drugs a person could carry without facing arrest, criminal charges or seizure. That represented an amount experts had said would be enough for most users to buy and consume over a day or two.
It was already a compromised amount — too low for drug use advocates and too high for police.
But the feds brushed it aside. Instead, federal Mental Health and Addictions Minister Carolyn Bennett came charging in with her own unilateral 2.5-gram limit.
It wasn’t hard to see who was whispering in her ear, given the 2.5-gram amount was exactly what had been suggested by police chiefs.
“The evidence that we have across the country and law enforcement, as well as here in British Columbia as well as the RCMP, has been that 85 per cent of the drugs that have been confiscated have been under two grams,” said Bennett. “And so we are moving with that.”
Several advocacy groups slammed the amount as so small as to be functionally useless for real-world users.
Ottawa implements its own timeline
The feds also bigfooted BC on the timeline.
BC has applied for permanent decriminalization to help combat an overdose crisis that has been a public health emergency for almost six years.
In its submission, the province argued that it would take as many as five years to see “measurable progress” in areas like improved interactions with police, reduced arrests, reduced court time and decreased racial disparities in drug charges.
Ottawa ignored this, too, instead on Tuesday declaring the entire thing a three-year “pilot program.”
Bennett said she would be looking for evidence of improvement in the pilot, though she apparently skipped the part in BC’s proposal where the province said it would take longer than three years to produce that evidence.
The decision to make decriminalization only a pilot project means if the federal government changes in the next three years (and under a minority parliament, that’s a serious possibility), the deal could easily be scrapped or abandoned by the next prime minister.
Regardless of the duration, BC had wanted things to start as quickly as possible. Here too, Ottawa dragged its feet, pushing everything to January 2023 — seven months from now, in which the overdose crisis will continue, and hundreds more people are likely to die.
Little interest in youth
BC had also wanted to research whether young adults aged 12 to 17 could eventually fall under decriminalization — given that more than 123 people in this age range have died of overdoses since 2016. It’s also an area where accessing treatment can be particularly problematic and where the stigma of prosecution and criminal charges can have life-changing impacts on a person’s future.
But federal officials appeared to have zero interest in this idea, and it was not mentioned in either the technical briefing or press conference announcement.
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Better than nothing
Amongst BC officials, the feeling of frustration and disappointment that Ottawa undercut its decriminalization proposal was offset by relief that at least the federal government had finally responded.
Ottawa’s approval is a start. But as Malcolmson put it on social media, it’s only “beginning the process to decriminalize personal possession of certain illicit drugs.”
The province’s next goal seems clear: Pressure Ottawa to raise the possession threshold. Then, make the decriminalization approval permanent.
Eventually, with time, BC hopes to get the federal government back on board with its original proposal, crafted so carefully with so many stakeholders.
It’s just too bad the federal government was too arrogant and paternalistic to listen to the province in the first place.
Rob is Daily Hive’s Political Columnist, tackling the biggest political stories in BC. You can catch him on CHEK News as their on-air Political Correspondent.
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