JUST WHAT ARE THESE MPS ON?

Can't you just see the same Liberal government that brought us the $1
billion gun registry fiasco now applying that expertise to "safe" injection
sites for heroin users?

First, who in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver would want to live near a
"safe" injection site - an oxymoron if we've ever heard one - as proposed
this week by a Liberal-dominated parliamentary committee?

Such a site would by definition attract drug users and dealers and prevent
the police from enforcing the law.

Who would want to make their way around the human carnage that such sites
have inevitably attracted in Europe, as noted by committee vice-chair Randy
White of the Canadian Alliance, who has visited several? (While White
supports many of the 39 proposals contained in the report, he's dead set
against this one.)

Thankfully, Ontario Health Minister Tony Clement also opposes this dumb
idea - and others such as prescribing heroin to hard-core addicts under a
separate plan. So do we.

As the Sun's Sue-Ann Levy has been writing for years, Toronto has long
experimented with trendy "harm reduction" programs, whether it's giving
alcoholics booze at a city-run hostel, or providing "safe crack kits" so
drug addicts can "safely" use their own drugs. The intent is to reduce the
risk to addicts, but to us it's all part of enabling them, instead of
focusing on treatment and law enforcement.

Ultimately, it's an admission of defeat. For example, one of the
committee's recommendations is that Corrections Canada establish two
prisons free of illict drugs, where convicts could choose to serve their
terms, which tells us all we need to know about what's going on at the rest
of them.

Today, the same committee is expected to recommend decriminalizing
marijuana - making it an offence punishable by a fine rather than jail time
or a criminal record.

But you have to ask - why all this and why now - just before Parliament's
Christmas break?

Say, it couldn't be an attempt to shift focus off the gun registry fiasco,
could it?