SUPERVISED INJECTION SITES: IDEOLOGY COMES WITH BIG
BLINKERS

In the ongoing struggle between ideology and evidence within the
Harper government, ideology too often wins.

The entire field of criminal justice features the government's
determination to ignore evidence. Occasionally, the evidence is so
incontrovertible, and the means for forcing it on the government so
forceful, that the government has no choice but to adjust course and,
in a few instances, to actually retreat.

So it will be with the supervised injection site in Vancouver's
Downtown Eastside after the Supreme Court's unanimous support of the
program's continuation and its utter rebuff of the Harper government's
opposition to it.

The minister at the time of the government's appeal against supervised
injections at the Insite clinic was Tony Clement, now under justified
assault for boondoggle spending in his constituency surrounding last
year's G8 summit in Huntsville.

Mr. Clement, as the then-minister of health, tried to justify the
unjustifiable in the face of overwhelming medical and scientific
evidence about the nature of drug addiction and how to cope with it.
He did the same routine in mid-2010, trying to defend the Prime
Minister's decision to scrap Statistics Canada's long-form census in
the face of overwhelming opposition from every knowledgeable Canadian
in the field of statistics.

Mr. Clement is now Treasury Board President, but he can look back and
find the arguments he deployed in the drug-injection case utterly and
unanimously shredded by the Supreme Court in a decision that should
have surprised no one.

The trial judge and appeal court had also ruled in favour of the
injection site's continuation as a place where addicts could get
controlled access to drugs under medical supervision. It was a policy
supported by medical associations, nurses, public health experts and
those learned in the cruel maladies of addiction.

Against this sturdy wall of legal rulings, scientific evidence and
expert opinion, the Harper Conservatives hurled their ideology,
arguing that drug users should be weaned off drugs. Drug use was Bad,
and morality dictated that the goal of abstinence and recovery should
prevail.

No expert would deny that, in the best of all worlds, weaning an
addict from addiction is the most desirable outcome. Too often, the
trouble is that addicts try and fail to quit many times. Alas, they're
afflicted with a disease rather than a moral shortcoming. Chief
Justice Beverley McLachlin, quoting approvingly from the trial judge,
wrote that addiction is a "primary, chronic disease."

Of course, the Harper Conservatives' "tough on crime" crusaders
insisted that the Criminal Code makes drug-taking a criminal offence.
So drug users were not only morally negligent, they were criminals,
too.

Technically, drug users are criminals. But the Liberal government had
granted an exemption from the criminal law to allow the injection site
to operate, the theory being that controlled use under supervision
would lead to less crime because addicts wouldn't be desperately
seeking money to feed their addiction. And, of course, controlled
access did less harm to the addicts than shooting up in back alleys
with shared and dirty needles.

But the Harper Conservatives said they wouldn't grant an exemption,
thereby threatening the injection site with closure. There the matter
rested until the Supreme Court said that such a decision - which it
described as "arbitrary and its effects grossly disproportionate -
risked lives ("security of the person"). This is another way of saying
that the minister (and the government) ignored evidence, or stared at
evidence and willfully ignored it.

The exercise of ministerial discretion, the court said, must rest on
"evidence" and the "principles of fundamental justice." It added:
"There is ... nothing to be gained (and much to be risked) in sending
the matter back to the Minister for reconsideration." Concluded the
court: "On the facts as found here, there can be only one response: to
grant the exemption."

These words are about as blunt as a court can use toward a government
whose view of evidence is "arbitrary" and in whose hands decisions
based on rights would be "risked."