NEW CHIEF CORONER A MAN WITH A PRAGMATIC APPROACH

The former Mountie says he favours a coordinated attack on drug addiction

When Terry Smith was a kid back in Whitby, Ont., his dad used to tell him:
You have two ears and one mouth for a reason - so that you can listen twice
as much as you talk.

Even at 53 and after 35 years in the RCMP - the last six as chief
superintendent of the Surrey detachment - Smith still believes in his
father's advice.

Ask him, for example, how he feels about Surrey Mayor Dunc McCallum's
frequent threats to dump the RCMP in favour of a municipal force and he
replies; "No comment."

Ask him what he's planning in his new job as B.C.'s new chief coroner and
he really begins carefully: "You know, I really hesitate to make too many
public pronouncements..."

In spite of that, the imposingly tall Smith is sure enough of what he wants
to take on that he's identified his chief interest: helping to develop a
more coordinated approach to addiction in this province.

"I'm convinced that everyone is trying hard to make a difference. But I
really see that we're probably not going to make a difference if we
continue to respond in isolation."

Like the two chief coroners before him, Larry Campbell and Vince Cain,
Smith sees death from addiction-related causes as a major, unresolved, and
growing problem.

That's not just drug addiction. Alcoholism is an equally big problem and
it's being tackled in the same inadequate way as the drug issue: People who
are drunk and addicted are picked up, put in jail, and let go. Treatment
is voluntary. There are no connections between different parts of the
system. And crucial solutions like affordable housing, job retraining, and
lifeskills training are relegated to the back burner.

Like the two previous coroners, he's also prepared to make a pragmatic
approach to solutions. That means accepting safe-injection sites and
heroin-maintenance programs for drug users as part of the harm-reduction
strategies that some groups want to add to the current enforcement,
prevention, and treatment approaches to drug addiction.

"I see those things as, while maybe not attractive, probably necessary to
move to the next steps."

Trying to coordinate B.C.'s notoriously fragmented and directionless system
of addiction treatment won't be a simple or quickly finished task.

But that's what Smith's life so far has trained him for.

He has a background in commercial-crime investigations with the RCMP, first
in Manitoba, then in Toronto. Commercial crime is the kind of gruelling
assignment that usually burns people out after only a few years, say those
with experience, because the investigations are so long and tortuous.

Smith spent 17 years there, earning an honours degree in commerce along the
way.

During his six years in Surrey, as head of the largest municipal RCMP
detachment in the country with 380 officers and a budget of $37 million, he
reorganized the force from a traditional model to one geared to community
policing - a feat that gets him invitations to international conferences
now, but was a long and complex undertaking.

Smith is looking forward to doing a different kind of job in the coroner's
office, which demands someone who will speak out and even be controversial.

But he is visibly mourning leaving the RCMP, an institution he's been with
since he got out of high school and is clearly the light of his life.

One of the few pictures in his spare office - along with a Norman Rockwell
print and photos of his three daughters and his wife, Simmie, who is the
diversity manager for the Surrey RCMP - is an art shot of the Mountie
uniform. He loves looking at it.

"I can smell the felt of the hat and the leather of the gloves when I see it."