Minister looks to move forward with SCS regulations after court ruling
By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on January 12, 2022.
LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com
Alberta’s Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Mike Ellis is glad provincial legislation about supervised consumption sites can move forward after a Monday court ruling.
Court of Queen’s Bench Judge R. Paul Belzil in Edmonton ruled against an injunction sought by two groups who wanted to prevent the province from enacting new regulations.
The Lethbridge Overdose Prevention Society and Moms Stop the Harm Society had filed the lawsuit last Aug. 13.
In his ruling, Belzil stated that LOPS had not met the burden of demonstrating that “the suspension of the challenged regulation would provide a public benefit greater than the public interest provided for in the challenged regulation.”
In a statement, Ellis on Tuesday said “recently, activist organizations sued the government to prevent Alberta from becoming the first jurisdiction in Canada to regulate supervised consumption services.
“On Jan. 10, Alberta’s government received notification that the injunction application filed against the regulation has been dismissed by the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta.
“I am pleased that this court decision has come forward and that this much-needed regulation can move forward. These quality standards were introduced with the intention to improve community safety in the areas surrounding supervised consumption sites, improve the quality of services that are being offered to people with addiction, and ensure that clients are better connected to the health-care system.
“We will not allow our communities to become chaotic and disorderly. We must ensure that while we treat addiction as a health-care issue we are also keeping communities safe and respecting law and order.
“That is exactly what these quality standards will do and why they are essential to safe and orderly provision of high-quality supervised consumption services as part of a recovery-oriented system of care,” said Ellis.
The minister said services must be provided in a way that’s fair to a community, assertive in dealing with addiction and compassionate to the people who are struggling.
“Most importantly, recovery must always be recognized as an achievable goal and clients should be assertively encouraged to pursue it.”
In a Twitter response to The Herald story on Tuesday, Tim Slaney with LOPS stated “to be clear, the LOPS/MSTH challenge is still in the very earliest stages and hasn’t been heard by a judge at all, let alone decided and lost. We were denied a preliminary injunction, which is basically an emergency request to stop the law pending a legal challenge.”
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”to be clear” the spokesperson for this batch of activist disagrees with this:
We will not allow our communities to become chaotic and disorderly. We must ensure that while we treat addiction as a health-care issue we are also keeping communities safe and respecting law and order.
You can put all the legislation in place you want, but as we constantly see in many areas such as illegal tents, shelters not following law in many areas, or how about masking laws, forged proof of vaccination/proof of negative rapid tests, there is no enforcement because you fail to give teeth for law enforcement to act.
Your regulations are not worth the cost of putting them on paper! This government has it Doctorate in throwing up ‘facades’ to make it look like it is doing something!