I may have the singular advantage on this committee of being the only MP from Vancouver. I've lived there for the last 26 years, and Insite has been operating for—jeez, I want to say 12 years. I drive through the Downtown Eastside every week. I've been on the Downtown Eastside literally hundreds and hundreds of times, and I want to tell you something: prior to Insite opening, the rate of vacancy of businesses and the general atmosphere on the street was worse. Do you know why? People were injecting drugs on the street, in the doorways, in the alleys. Right in front of businesses, people would inject drugs and collapse in front of the door.
When Insite opened, it was in a very discreet way. I have to tell you that it was several years before I actually knew where they were. That's how discreet they are. They have taken the street drug use that would have been happening on the streets, in the alleys, and in front of businesses, and they've moved a significant amount of it indoors. I talked to members of the Chinese business association—this is located in historic Chinatown—and they had a lot of issues with this site when it first opened. If you go and talk to those businesses now, they are absolutely convinced that the opening of Insite has helped the general environment and atmosphere around Chinatown because it has moved this activity indoors.
You know, supervised consumption sites are specialized health care facilities. They provide a range of services to mitigate the harms associated with substance use. Their core functions are to connect people who use drugs with sterile injection equipment, to supervise people while they are using psychoactive drugs, and to provide overdose reversal, first aid and wound care, and referrals to other health care services. In many cases they also provide referrals to addiction treatment programs, something that I think should be part of every supervised consumption site. I really like the fact that Insite has OnSite upstairs, where there are treatment beds. Every time someone goes into Insite, they have an opportunity to go there.
I want to say that to me, the challenge before this committee is to make sure that the criteria that go before the minister before a section 56 exemption is granted should be guided by the health perspective. We don't ask the community if they are in agreement if an abortion clinic gets opened. We don't ask the community if methadone treatment should happen in a pharmacy in their community. Those are core health services. While it may impact a community, so do hospitals and so does putting in a local fire station, with trucks going in and out of the station at three in the morning. These all have an impact on the community, but we know that these are core public services. Our job here is to make sure that an applicant can get an application in and the proper factors can be taken into account, not extraneous factors that serve only one purpose.
I'll say it here: the only reason that the Conservatives passed Bill C-2, with their 26 criteria, was that they were ideologically opposed to supervised consumption sites and wanted to put up a lot of barriers to opening them. That's why, yes, three sites in Montreal were approved this week, 16 months after they applied. I mean, every stakeholder in the country is telling us that those criteria are making it take an extremely long amount of time. Toronto has been waiting for months. Victoria has been waiting for months and months.
Again, this is a public health emergency. I'm glad to see Dr. Carrie uses that term. The Liberals are using that term. The New Democrats encourage the use of this term. This is a national public health emergency. People are dying, and when people are dying, I think it behooves us as a committee to get a process that is fair, medically based, and science-based, one that can expedite the opening of these life-saving facilities while taking into account the proper criteria.
I think the criteria proposed by Dr. Carrie are just a continuation, in a truncated form, of Bill C-2. Putting up additional barriers by consulting groups that really don't have any particular stake in the health care aspect of this problem will simply delay the process, make it more difficult, and make it more time-consuming. In the meantime, we will see more people die even as we know that these sites could be up and running.
On the first day that Insite opened, they reversed 15 overdoses. Not all of those people would have died, but I bet that some of those people would have died had those overdoses happened out on the street. Those are the stakes that we're dealing with here.