Connect with us
[the_ad id="89560"]

Addictions

Province providing $17 Million to double crisis teams in Edmonton adding support throughout the city

Published

3 years ago

9 minute read

Helping people in need, keeping Edmonton safe

Alberta’s government is partnering with the Edmonton Police Service (EPS) to help address the addiction crisis by connecting more people to much-needed supports.

Alberta’s government is continuing to take action to keep communities safe while treating mental health and addiction as health care issues. Through Budget 2023, an investment of $17 million over three years will double the number of Human-centred Engagement and Liaison Partnership (HELP) teams in Edmonton and provide recovery-oriented health supports to people in EPS custody.

“We are continuing to take a fair, firm and compassionate approach towards addressing addiction and mental health issues while keeping communities safe. Police are vital partners in addressing the complex social challenges facing Edmonton, and our government is proud to be partnering with them to help connect Albertans to the supports that they need.”

Nicholas Milliken, Minister of Mental Health and Addiction

“Edmonton police are serving on the front lines of the addiction crisis and have an important role to play. This funding brings together health professionals, community partners and police through partnerships that share a common goal: helping more people get well and pursue recovery while keeping our communities safe.”

Mike Ellis, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Services and chair, Edmonton Public Safety and Community Response Task Force

“As MLA for Edmonton-South West, I am pleased to see that our government has allotted much needed funding to create more HELP teams to support the Edmonton Police Service. The new support will help address the public safety, mental health and addiction crisis in the city. The safety of the people of Edmonton is paramount. No one should be afraid to walk alone in our streets. We all share a common goal of providing adequate supports while keeping our communities safe”.

Kaycee Madu, MLA for Edmonton-South West

This funding includes:

  • $3.5 million for 12 new social navigator positions and two team leads, which will double the number of HELP teams in Edmonton
  • $2 million for eight new social navigator positions to support the EPS Divergence and Desistance Branch
  • $2.4 million for eight mental health therapists to support Edmonton’s 911 Dispatch Centre and EPS officers over the phone with clinical expertise
  • $6.3 million to add the following health professionals:
    • two full-time health care practitioners, two paramedics, two recovery coaches and 12 community safety officers at EPS Downtown Division
    • two paramedics at EPS Northwest Division
  • $2 million for equipment, training, administrative and other related costs 
  • $858,000 in one-time capital funding for six new HELP team vehicles and facility upgrades

These initiatives are part of ongoing efforts led by the Edmonton Public Safety and Community Response Task Force to improve public safety while treating addiction and mental health as health care issues. These efforts also include tripling the number of Police and Crisis Teams (PACT) in Edmonton to support people experiencing a mental health crisis.

Expanding outreach teams in Edmonton

Like many large cities, Edmonton has been hard hit by the addiction crisis, and this is especially evident in the downtown area. Expanding outreach teams in Edmonton will help respond to an urgent need to connect people struggling with mental health and addiction to critical services and mitigate social disorder.

“Community wellness and community safety go hand in hand. The HELP team has shown impressive results, and we are proud to continue building on their good work and introduce more integrated health services for people in police custody. We are grateful for the support of the government. These actions are important steps in responding to the complex social issues facing our city.”

Dale McFee, chief of police, Edmonton Police Service and member, Edmonton Public Safety and Community Response Task Force

“Additional support for the HELP teams is positive news for Edmonton. This investment is key in breaking the cycle, by shifting the focus on mental health and addiction away from enforcement and directing individuals to programs and services that can help them live with hope and dignity.”

Tim Cartmell, pihêsiwin Ward councillor, City of Edmonton and member, Edmonton Public Safety and Community Response Task Force

Alberta’s government is doubling the number of HELP teams in Edmonton. These teams pair police officers with social navigators from local community organizations who can help Albertans access recovery-oriented supports. The province is also providing funding to add social navigators to the EPS Divergence and Desistance Branch, which works with individuals who most frequently interact with the health and justice systems, and to place AHS mental health therapists in Edmonton’s 911 Dispatch Centre and to have mental health therapists available to support EPS officers over the phone with clinical expertise.

Providing addiction and mental health support in police custody

Police officers frequently respond to calls related to addiction and mental health. By offering a range of services and supports for people in police custody, Alberta’s government can support Albertans with complex addiction and mental health challenges while improving public safety for everyone.

People detained on a public intoxication charge will be assessed and provided options for treatment and support in a secure environment at the Edmonton Police Service Downtown Division. This location is close to both the downtown core and Chinatown, which are areas of Edmonton where significant public safety concerns have been identified by the city, local businesses, business associations and Edmontonians. Health professionals will offer medical support, connect clients with other social and mental health and addiction supports, and provide referrals to programs like the Virtual Opioid Dependency Program, which provides same-day access to life-saving medications.

In December 2022, Alberta’s government established two cabinet task forces to bring community partners together to address the issues of addiction, homelessness and public safety in Calgary and Edmonton. The two Public Safety and Community Response Task Forces are responsible for implementing $187 million in provincial funding to further build out a recovery-oriented system of addiction and mental health care. The initiatives being implemented are part of a fair, firm and compassionate approach to keeping communities safe while treating addiction and mental health as health care issues.

Budget 2023 secures Alberta’s future by transforming the health care system to meet people’s needs, supporting Albertans with the high cost of living, keeping our communities safe and driving the economy with more jobs, quality education and continued diversification.

Quick facts

  • Health services staff at the EPS Downtown Division will be able to assess and help up to 17 people at any given time.
  • This funding is part of the $63 million for initiatives that specifically increase access to addiction treatment and support in Edmonton, implemented through the Edmonton Public Safety and Community Response Task Force.
  • Albertans experiencing addiction or mental health challenges can contact 211 for information on services in their community. 211 is free, confidential and available 24-7.
  • Albertans struggling with opioid addiction can contact the Virtual Opioid Dependency Program (VODP) by calling 1-844-383-7688, seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily. VODP provides same-day access to addiction medicine specialists. There is no wait list.

Before Post

Related Topics:

This is a news release from the Government of Alberta.

Follow Author

More from this author
Alberta / 2 days ago

Alberta and Ottawa ink landmark energy agreement

Alberta / 5 days ago

Alberta introducing dual practice health care model to increase options and shorten wait times while promising protection for publicly funded services

Alberta / 5 days ago

Premier Smith explains how private clinics will be introduced in Alberta

Addictions

Activists Claim Dealers Can Fix Canada’s Drug Problem

Published on November 18, 2025

By

By Adam Zivo

We should learn from misguided experiments with activist-driven drug ideologies.

Some Canadian public-health researchers have argued that the nation’s drug dealers, far from being a public scourge, are central to the cause of “harm reduction,” and that drug criminalization makes it harder for them to provide this much-needed “mutual aid.” Incredibly, these ideas have gained traction among Canada’s policymakers, and some have even been put into practice.

Gillian Kolla, an influential harm-reduction activist and researcher, spearheaded the push to whitewash drug trafficking in Canada. Over the past decade, she has advocated for many of the country’s failed laissez-faire drug policies. In her 2020 doctoral dissertation, she described her hands-on research into Toronto’s “harm reduction satellite sites”—government-funded programs that paid drug users to provide services out of their homes.

The sites Kolla studied were operated by the nonprofit South Riverdale Community Health Centre (SRCHC) in Toronto. Addicts participating in the programs received $250 per month in exchange for distributing naloxone and clean paraphernalia (needles and crack pipes, for example), as well as for reversing overdoses and educating acquaintances on safer consumption practices. At the time of Kolla’s research (2016–2017), the SRCHC was operating nine satellite sites, which reportedly distributed about 1,500 needles and syringes per month.

Canada permits supervised consumption sites—facilities where people can use drugs under staff oversight—to operate so long as they receive an official exemption via the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. As the sites Kolla observed did not receive exemptions, they were certainly illegal. Kolla herself acknowledged this in her dissertation, writing that she, with the approval of the University of Toronto, never recorded real names or locations in her field notes, in case law enforcement subpoenaed her research data.

Even so, the program seems to have enjoyed the blessing of Toronto’s public health officials and police. The satellite sites received local funding from 2010 onward, after a decade of operating on a volunteer basis, apparently with special protection from law enforcement. In her dissertation, Kolla described how SRCHC staff trained police officers to leave their sites alone, and how satellite-site workers received special ID badges and plaques to ward off arrest.

Kolla made it clear that many of these workers were not just addicts but dealers, too, and that tolerance of drug trafficking was a “key feature” of the satellite sites. She even described, in detail, how she observed one of the site workers packaging and selling heroin alongside crackpipes and needles.

In her dissertation, Kolla advocated expanding this permissive approach. She claimed that traffickers practice harm reduction by procuring high-quality drugs for their customers and avoiding selling doses that are too strong.

“Negative framings of drug selling as predatory and inherently lacking in care make it difficult to perceive the wide variety of acts of mutual aid and care that surround drug buying and selling as practices of care,” she wrote.

In truth, dealers routinely sell customers tainted or overly potent drugs. Anyone who works in the addiction field can testify that this is a major reason that overdose deaths are so common.

Ultimately, Kolla argued that “real harm reduction” should involve drug traffickers, and that criminalization creates “tremendous barriers” to this goal.

The same year she published her dissertation, Kolla cowrote a paper in the Harm Reduction Journal with her Ph.D. supervisor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. The article affirmed the view that drug traffickers are essential to the harm-reduction movement. Around this time, the SRCHC collaborated with the Toronto-based Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre— the only other organization running such sites—to produce guidelines on how to replicate and scale up the experiment.

Thankfully, despite its local adoption, this idea did not catch on at the national level. It was among the few areas in the early 2020s where Canada did not fully descend into addiction-enabling madness. Yet, like-minded researchers still echo Kolla’s work.

In 2024, for example, a group of American harm-reduction advocates published a paper in Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports that concluded, based on just six interviews with drug traffickers in Indianapolis, that dealers are “uniquely positioned” to provide harm-reduction services, partly because they are motivated by “the moral imperative to provide mutual aid.” Among other things, the authors argued that drug criminalization is harmful because it removes dealers from their social networks and prevents them from enacting “community-based practices of ethics and care.”

It’s instructive to review what ultimately happened with the originators of this movement—Kolla and the SRCHC. Having failed to whitewash drug trafficking, Kolla moved on to advocating for “safer supply”—an experimental strategy that provides addicts with free recreational drugs to dissuade use of riskier street substances. The Canadian government funded and expanded safer supply, thanks in large part to Kolla’s academic work. It abandoned the experiment after news broke that addicts resell their safer supply on the black market to buy illicit fentanyl, flooding communities with diverted opioids and fueling addiction.

The SRCHC was similarly discredited after a young mother, Karolina Huebner-Makurat, was shot and killed near the organization’s supervised consumption site in 2023. Subsequent media reports revealed that the organization had effectively ignored community complaints about public safety, and that staff had welcomed, and even supported, drug traffickers. One of the SRCHC’s harm-reduction workers was eventually convicted of helping Huebner-Makurat’s shooter evade capture by hiding him from the police in an Airbnb apartment and lying to the police.

There is no need for policymakers to repeat these mistakes, or to embrace its dysfunctional, activist-driven drug ideologies. Let this be another case study of why harm-reduction policies should be treated with extreme skepticism.

Our content is always free

If you want to help us commission more high-quality journalism,

consider getting a voluntary paid subscription.

Continue Reading

Addictions

Canadian gov’t not stopping drug injection sites from being set up near schools, daycares

Published on November 14, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canada’s health department told MPs there is not a minimum distance requirement between safe consumption sites and schools, daycares or playgrounds.

So-called “safe” drug injection sites do not require a minimum distance from schools, daycares, or even playgrounds, Health Canada has stated, and that has puzzled some MPs. 

Canadian Health Minister Marjorie Michel recently told MPs that it was not up to the federal government to make rules around where drug use sites could be located.

“Health Canada does not set a minimum distance requirement between safe consumption sites and nearby locations such as schools, daycares or playgrounds,” the health department wrote in a submission to the House of Commons health committee.

“Nor does the department collect or maintain a comprehensive list of addresses for these facilities in Canada.”

Records show that there are 31 such “safe” injection sites allowed under the Controlled Drugs And Substances Act in six Canadian provinces. There are 13 are in Ontario, five each in Alberta, Quebec, and British Columbia, and two in Saskatchewan and one in Nova Scotia.

The department noted, as per Blacklock’s Reporter, that it considers the location of each site before approving it, including “expressions of community support or opposition.”

Michel had earlier told the committee that it was not her job to decide where such sites are located, saying, “This does not fall directly under my responsibility.”

Conservative MP Dan Mazier had asked for limits on where such “safe” injection drug sites would be placed, asking Michel in a recent committee meeting, “Do you personally review the applications before they’re approved?”

Michel said that “(a)pplications are reviewed by the department.”

Michel said, “Supervised consumption sites were created to prevent overdose deaths.”

Mazier continued to press Michel, asking her how many “supervised consumption sites approved by your department are next to daycares.”

“I couldn’t tell you exactly how many,” Michel replied.

Mazier was mum on whether or not her department would commit to not approving such sites near schools, playgrounds, or daycares.

An injection site in Montreal, which opened in 2024, is located close to a kindergarten playground.

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has called such sites “drug dens” and has blasted them as not being “safe” and “disasters.”

Records show that the Liberal government has spent approximately $820 million from 2017 to 2022 on its Canadian Drugs and Substances Strategy. However, even Canada’s own Department of Health admitted in a 2023 report that the Liberals’ drug program only had “minimal” results.

Recently, LifeSiteNews reported that the British Columbia government decided to stop a so-called “safe supply” free drug program in light of a report revealing many of the hard drugs distributed via pharmacies were resold on the black market.

British Columbia Premier David Eby recently admitted that allowing the decriminalization of hard drugs in British Columbia via a federal pilot program was a mistake.

Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s loose drug initiatives were deemed such a disaster in British Columbia that Eby’s government asked Trudeau to re-criminalize narcotic use in public spaces, a request that was granted.

Official figures show that overdoses went up during the decriminalization trial, with 3,313 deaths over 15 months, compared with 2,843 in the same time frame before drugs were temporarily legalized.

Continue Reading

Trending

X