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Toronto city council voted in favour of a supervised injection site during the summer. Alberta is building a plan to introduce safe injection to combat the fentanyl crisis. Hamilton is looking for a place to put a site, and Vancouver is planning one that will be women-only.

This building boom in supervised injection sites is all based on a singular principle backed up by years of evidence: Drug addiction may be bad, but unsupervised drug addiction is even worse.

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This was a concept long ignored by Canadian conservatives.

Even as studies piled up showing the lives saved by an inaugural safe injection site in Vancouver, the Harper government never got over their initial objection that it was “a location for sanctioned use of drugs.”

And then we come to oil pipelines, a domain where many of the arguments — and the people making them — are conveniently reversed.

Canada has a 1.8 million barrel-a-day oil addiction. It has an oil industry keeping hundreds of thousands employed. And it also has a political establishment which generally agrees that this whole thing isn’t sustainable — and that oil is a thing to be phased out.