The City of Nanaimo will at least look at its options around regulating drug use in public spaces.
City council, at a meeting Monday, May 15, voted to ask for a staff report on the issue. Coun. Ian Thorpe brought forward the motion as a reaction to the impacts of the decriminalization of hard drugs in B.C. earlier this year.
“We have had constant concerns and complaints from our citizens about open drug use and discarded drug paraphernalia in public places,” he said. “My motion is not about targeting people, it’s about targeting behaviour which is very concerning to our citizens.”
A majority of council members supported the motion, including Coun. Erin Hemmens who felt it is important that council debate the issue, and Coun. Janice Perrino, who called the drug crisis a complicated problem.
“We’re never going to find an answer,” she said. “But the truth is, we’re trying to at least make everyone else feel as though we’re doing something on the other side to protect them.”
Mayor Leonard Krog said Thorpe’s motion represents “the cry of this community” and said he is in favour “not because I think it will be effective, not because I think staff are going to tell us we’ll be able to regulate it, not because I believe for a moment that fining people who live in poverty on the streets will change their behaviour as a result … but I am not prepared to sit back as a community and just wait for something to happen.”
Council was divided on the motion. Coun. Tyler Brown was among those in opposition, for philosophical and idealogical reasons, and also practical ones, he said. Parents will still have to do sweeps of parks before their kids play, he pointed out, and business owners will still have to pick up after drug users on their premises.
“Even if there was a bylaw in place tomorrow, it would be no different than when these drugs were fully criminalized in terms of the usage on the streets and the impacts it’s having on the neighbourhood and communities,” Brown said.
Coun. Paul Manly said it’s difficult to see people openly using drugs on Nanaimo’s streets and said decriminalization without treatment facilities is a failure. But he opposed a motion that would essentially ask about options for the city to move people along.
“The people that we’re seeing on the street that are openly using drugs are homeless, and that means that we need to provide somewhere for them to use drugs, because otherwise, we’re driving them into the bushes and that is where they will die,” Manly said.
Coun. Hilary Eastmure said she’s been seeing the kind of open drug use she personally hadn’t seen before and is disturbed by it. However, she said a bylaw wouldn’t be effective and said the city should instead be asking what the provincial government can do to make the situation more tenable for municipalities.
“We need the province to step up and to treat this crisis like the crisis that it is,” she said. “They’ve thrown us in the deep end with no water wings right now with decriminalization and no safe supply, and the treatment beds they’re announcing are like 10 at a time. It’s not OK.”
Also at the meeting, council heard from Sarah Lovegrove, a registered nurse and co-chairperson of Nanaimo’s Community Action Team. She said decriminalization reduces barriers and stigma that keep people from accessing life-saving services, and said any punitive approaches by the city would harm health and safety.
“Attempting to regulate substance use in any way circumvents the intention of provincial decriminalization,” she said.
Council voted 5-4 in favour of asking for the report on regulating drug use in public spaces, with councillors Manly, Brown, Eastmure and Ben Geselbracht opposed.
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