Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to our witnesses for being here today.
I just want to begin by saying that when the process for InSite in Vancouver began 11 years ago, there was a great fear from many of us—it was a controversial discussion, and a lot of consultation took place—that InSite would become this lightning rod, that it would be held up as a panacea for solving everything, and that everything would revolve around that. Of course, that's not the case. A safe injection site is really part of a solution. It's really part of an overall health strategy for dealing with injection drug users and drug overdoses and health and treatment and so on.
It's very interesting, because I saw the debate that happened in Vancouver and that eventually settled down. Now the facility is very well accepted. I see the same debate taking place here today. It is the fear that somehow InSite is responsible for every problem that we have with drug use. I think we should remember that the purpose of a supervised injection facility is primarily to prevent people from dying from drug overdoses and to help people connect to treatment options. There is a very well-used saying in the downtown eastside that a dead drug user can't get treatment. It's certainly a place to begin.
So it's very disappointing to me today to hear a representative from a police association pose the question “Which neighbourhood will be sacrificed?” It's very, very disappointing for me to hear that, because it makes me realize really just how much fear there is and how little understanding there is about what a supervised injection site means and what it actually does.
To just give one quick example, earlier in the summer this year there was a spate of bad drugs on the street in Vancouver. There were public warnings issued by the police department. There was a number of overdoses. In fact the police department issued statements and e-mails urging drug users to be extremely cautious and told them to go to InSite. It was a public health advisory from the police department who were seeing what was taking place on the street.
To Dr. McKeown from the Toronto Board of Health, thank you very much for the excellent brief that you sent in. One of the concerns that I saw in your written submission, and I think was echoed in a brief from the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network and the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, is that in effect Bill C-2, and I would like to focus on the bill, doesn't ever indicate what level of information, research, opposition or support would actually result in an application being accepted or denied. So in effect there is never a threshold that is given.
I would like to ask you whether or not there is any other service you provide where you might have to meet criteria where that would be the case, that you are actually going into a unknown situation where you have no idea what it is you actually have to meet. It seems to me with this bill that the criteria are so open-ended, with no threshold established, how would you ever know that you'd collected enough information or enough opinions?