At council today there was a motion by Pincott and Colley-Urquhart to review methadone clinic land use. This was in response to the community of Braeside’s reaction a few weeks back to a methadone clinic residing in their community. In particular the motion asked City administration to report back on how applications can be better communicated to residents and how the City can better assist methadone clinics in the future.

Ward 13 City Councillor Diane Colley-Urquhart in particular made a spectacular and moving speech regarding the NIMBY mob in Braeside and what should be done in the future to prevent such incidents from occurring again. Below is her speech at city council:

I just wanted to share with members of council the meeting that Alderman Pincott hosted in Braeside. I attended because where this clinic is operating impacts Ward 13 as well. There were residents from Woodlands and Woodbine. Woodbine has Hull Homes, they treat young kids there and this is certainly a drug protocol as well.

The meeting was to start at 7pm. Alderman Pincott had members of the Calgary Police Service there, who hadn’t had any consultation with the methadone clinic. So the police were caught off guard because they didn’t know what the expectations were.

It was a hot summer night. There were fire restrictions and capacity issues in the room. There were 300 people seated. There were another 75 standing. Alderman Pincott was informed that there were another 300 people outside waiting to get in and they were not happy. So Alderman Pincott had to go outside to speak with these folks. He was gone about 25 minutes. Meanwhile people inside were starting to boil and were very upset.

If anyone needed police protection that night it was Alderman Pincott. There was nothing he could say or do that would please the people who were there. They were wild about this.

Everyone was a loser that night. Alderman Pincott was a loser because he was trying to present both sides of the issue in a reasonable approach and provide a venue where people could be heard. But no one wanted to listen. There were cat calls. There was yelling. There were accusations toward Alderman Pincott for a whole variety of reasons.

The community association was a loser. The president tried to work very closely with Alderman Pincott with this issue. They got targeted as well. That was unfortunate. The residents of the community got labelled as NIMBYs. A lot of the way people expressed themselves that night further emphasized that that was probably true.

The doctors who wanted to set up the clinic were losers. They felt they didn’t need to go through anything special. They had the zoning.
 
The owners of the shopping mall were losers because the site was subleased. The owners were told it was a psychology clinic. And then came the letter saying that it was really a methadone clinic. And so they weren’t even told what it was. The merchants were losers because everyone in the audience said that they were going to stop shopping in the mall.

I don’t know what we accomplished that night, other than everyone going away feeling quite bad. But most of all the biggest losers were those who needed the treatment. There were people who had successfully overcome drug addiction, whether they are street drugs, whether they are prescription drugs for chronic pain.

Ninety percent of the people who would come to that clinic were coming by bus because when you are heavily sedated on methadone you can’t drive. People were worried they would be mixing with school children during school hours. It just went on and on.

This motion today is I think the partial bandage to pull this out of the Land Use bylaw and at least trigger a community consultation process through the development permit process. It is only a partial answer.

We need to do more on this. It reminds me of the stigma attached to homeless people about 5 to 6 years ago. People said why don’t they just go get a job so that they can get their own home. Fifty percent of those people were the working poor. We didn’t differentiate whether it was a provincial, federal or municipal issue. It is a community issue. So we developed this comprehensive plan to end homelessness. All of us are working together.

This is no different. We are one of the few cities in Canada that does not have a comprehensive drug strategy for this community. So we certainly approach it from a harm reduction perspective, an educational perspective, a rehabilitation perspective, and an enforcement perspective. It is a shame we are looking at this issue from a Land Use perspective. This is the problem. It should be coming from Community Protective Services. It is a community problem.

AADAC has said they are willing to work with the City. That’s where the funding comes from. Alderman Jones is absolutely right, Alberta Health Services can do a much better job working with the City of Calgary on these methadone clinics. They are moving to a more community based strategy in dealing with this problem. It is not going to be based just at the Sheldon Chumir, it is going to be community based, which is where it should be. So you can’t compare how it operates at the Sheldon Chumir and the way it would operate in a community. A Good Neighbour agreement is a good idea, it takes us partially there, but it is not a comprehensive strategy.

What are we saying when we are delegating this off to a light industrial area? It reminds me when we had minus 30 degree weather for the overflow of homeless at the Brick. Lets put them in the light industrial area. I am not so sure. We have professionals working in the downtown area who prescribe methadone. We don’t need to send them off to a light industrial area.

For concentration Alderman Hawkesworth, creating a critical mass of these is something that needs to be dealt with in a comprehensive community strategy. I have a whole bunch more points, but I will close by saying that the Canadian Mental Health Association has a commission and Calgary was chosen to be the secretariat. This is something we should be terribly proud of. We have to get to the bottom of the stigma of drug addiction and mental health issues.

For the full transcript of the motion debate click here.