Colby Cosh: Bill 34 suspension shows the slippery slope of B.C. harm reduction

I must offer congratulations to the Harm Reduction Nurses Association, a pressure group numbering 220 or so people that has now succeeded in legally delaying the introduction of British Columbia’s Restricting Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act (now suspended in limbo and often referred to as Bill 34).

In November, I wrote about the HRNA’s ambitious effort to block Bill 34, which was the New Democratic government’s attempt to save the cause of drug decriminalization by re outlawing hard drug use in places like parks, playgrounds, transit stations and entryways to business and homes. In the HRNA’s excitingly avant garde view, the philosophy of “harm reduction” seemingly forbids regulating the use of crack, opioids and methamphetamine in public spaces.

To its members, drug dependence is a permanent personal identity like race and economic class. There’s a group of “People Who Use Drugs,” now simply “PWUD” in the eyes of the B.C. Supreme Court , and the PWUDs are inevitably going to suffer frequent drug overdoses as they go about their PWUDding.

Given these axioms, and given that the substances PWUDs possess and use have been decriminalized locally in B.C., public property is obviously the least harmful place for PWUDS to inhale or inject. If they overdose in public, some friendly passerby or fellow addict has a chance of saving them with a blast of Narcan.

The nurses petitioned B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson, who turned 72 last month, to enjoin the coming into force of Bill 34 for a few months while they prepare Charter arguments against it. (Necessary reminder: B.C.’s “Supreme Court” is an awkwardly named superior trial court, not an appellate court.) The HRNA had to show that irreparable harm would result unless the law was held up, and it had a complete success.

The judge wasn’t terrifically worried about requiring the HRNA’s frontline drug rescue workers to establish their right to speak for the PWUDs and the general public interest. Indeed, he accepted that the potential of moral injury to nurses and other self styled harm reducers themselves was enough of a pretext to permit blocking the law temporarily.

Lawyers for the B.C. government tried to make the social bargain argument in the courtroom. Bill 34, they contended, is just one part of B.C.’s total scheme for addressing the province’s world famous drug abuse problems, which neither “harm reduction” nor decriminalization appear to have diminished.

The new law thus shouldn’t be thwarted or delayed in isolation. The HNRA, with some crucial help from an “illicit drinkers” organization , made its plea that empowering cops to say “Move along, bub” to tweakers and opioid users might kill some of them, which certainly qualifies as “irreparable harm” under the law.

Hinkson was powerfully influenced, in ruling for the HRNA and overriding the legislature, by the ongoing existence of an official “public health emergency” in B.C. — one that was declared in 2016, when toxic drug deaths in the province were happening at less than half the present rate. Forgive me for asking: “Have you considered calling off the emergency in the hope that it might stop?” B.C., in tandem with Ottawa, has been implementing the most radical harm reductionist drug policy that may exist anywhere on the planet.

The harms, whichever ones you choose to count, have done nothing but intensify. Now a left wing government whose leader has the highest imaginable harm reductionist credentials is trying to adjust the law to mitigate obvious and blood curdling side effects. But the emergency itself has become part of the pretext for a court to obstruct the evolution of the law.

Surely you couldn’t come up with a better example of a slippery slope if you were physically on top of Whistler Mountain? National Post Twitter.com/colbycosh.