EDMONTON—Medicine Hat’s MLA is calling on the province’s new health minister to halt funding for a supervised consumption site that is set to open in the southern Alberta city.

Drew Barnes, a United Conservative Party (UCP) MLA for the riding of Cypress-Medicine Hat, wrote an open letter to Health Minister Tyler Shandro on Friday urging him to reallocate funding that has been set aside for a drug consumption site in Medicine Hat to instead be used for counselling and enhanced detox services.

“Consultations with stakeholders and Medicine Hat residents need to be reopened and the development of the supervised consumption site must be suspended,” Barnes wrote in the letter, published on his Facebook page. Barnes previously served as health critic during his time as Wildrose MLA.

The Star Edmonton has reached out to Shandro and the health ministry for a response to the letter, but did not receive one in time for publication.

The site in question is set to open later in 2019, according to HIV Community Link in Medicine Hat, which is behind it. It will be on the east side of the city’s downtown — a location that was chosen after “a comprehensive needs assessment and community engagement process since 2017,” according to a press release by the organization in January, when the location was finalized.

HIV Community Link has also released a report outlining in detail the consultation process, which included over 40 meetings with government personnel, residents, and businesses. The site is pending approval from Health Canada.

Small Alberta cities like Medicine Hat were hit twice as hard by the opioid crisis, according to numbers released by the Canadian Institute for Health Information, and Medicine Hat has the fifth-highest rate of opioid poisoning out of all small cities in Canada. Leslie Hill, executive director of HIV Community Link, said 16 people died in the city due to an opioid overdose last year.

Hill said a supervised consumption site in the city is badly needed to serve its community, and she hopes her organization will be able to have a conversation with the new United Conservative government to explain that need and the extensive consultations behind the plan to bring the site to Medicine Hat.

“My hope is that we will work with the new government to help them understand our process and to implement the services as quickly as we can, because there’s still a lot of people who are at risk in this community,” Hill said.

But in his open letter, Barnes maintains that Medicine Hat residents need to be consulted further, and that many have expressed their wish to have taxpayers’ dollars allocated to alternative forms of counselling and detox services instead. Barnes did not respond to requests for comment on his letter in time for publication.

Barnes’ letter is the first public remark on the opioid crisis and harm reduction strategies from an elected MLA since Alberta’s new provincial government was sworn in on April 30. It is in line with what Premier Jason Kenney has said on the campaign trail regarding supervised consumption sites and the need to have more robust consultations before any new ones are approved.

During a campaign stop in Medicine Hat on April 8, Kenney said his party’s focus on combating the opioid crisis is to allocate funding for mental health supports. He added he plans to conduct a review of current supervised consumption sites to see if they are “optimal.”

“It’s not enough to help people inject poison,” Kenney told reporters then.

Currently, there are five community supervised consumption sites in Alberta — three in Edmonton, one in Calgary, and one in Lethbridge. The latest report from December 2018 shows over 2,000 overdoses were attended to at those sites last year.

Many harm reduction and public health experts view supervised consumption sites as integral to combating the opioid crisis and reducing the overall number of deaths linked to overdoses. Previous estimates by the province suggest that an average of two people die per day due to an opioid overdose.

That is why Barnes’ open letter drew sharp criticism and worry from Hakique Virani, an Edmonton-based public health physician and an expert on harm reduction strategies related to opioid use.

Virani said he’s concerned Barnes’ request may lead to a shift in moving away from harm reduction methods that are evidence-based, and more toward initiatives that aren’t proven to be as effective, such as alternative counselling methods and enhanced detox services.

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He drew parallels to Ontario’s current Progressive Conservative government under Doug Ford, which has recently moved to defund several consumption sites in the province.

“The writing is on the wall,” Virani said.

Nadine Yousif is a reporter/photographer for Star Edmonton. Follow her on twitter: @nadineyousif_

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