Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Vancouver East for her question and I want to applaud her for her constant advocacy for safe injection sites in the Downtown Eastside.
I am a former city councillor. We had these discussions when I was on council. The council that I sat on said it was much better for us to zone for public health care services, such as injection sites, and have public hearings and get the public out to express where they would like to see these services located. My council felt it had a responsibility to take its share of those public health services and address these problems, rather than trying to leave them to the police to address or leave them to neighbourhoods where they became a problem with things such as needles in parks and school playgrounds.
Therefore, we would have been hard pressed to find people in my community who were opposed to this reasonable approach to dealing with injection drug use.