Photo Credit: Vancouver Coastal Health

Lost in the shuffle amid the recent tragedy in Haiti, parliamentary drama and growing Olympic fever, a recent B.C. Court of Appeal ruling stands to reshape the way the Canadian legal system deals with addiction. On January 15, 2010 the Court of Appeal for British Columbia dismissed a federal government appeal to close InSite, Canada’s only supervised safe-injection site. The federal government is widely expected to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, opening the door for a new approach towards Canadian policy in dealing with addiction and substance abuse.

In the 87 page ruling, Justice Huddart wrote that the court dismissed the federal government’s appeal “by reason of the application of the doctrine of interjurisdictional immunity”, which prevents a law from being applied outside of its constitutional jurisdiction. With health care professionals, academics, and courts recognizing InSite as a provider of legitimate health-care services – an area of provincial jurisdiction – the Court of Appeal found that federal drug laws prohibiting the possession of controlled substances were constitutionally unable to override the application of provincial health-care programs. The Court felt that attempts by the federal government to close InSite were an “indisputable intrusion of the federal government into the provision of medical services”.

A 2008 ruling by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Ian Pitfield, upon which the recent appeal was based, found that sections 4 and 5 of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) were inconsistent with section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states that “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.” Justice Pitfield found that attempts to criminalize the safe, sanitary and medically supervised consumption of controlled substances by individuals with severe addiction runs contrary to the Charter’s guarantee that everyone, addicted or not, has the right to life and security of the person (emphasis added by author).

InSite is supported by B.C.’s Attorney-General, the provincial health authority, the Vancouver Police Department, current and former mayors of Vancouver and a broad spectrum of health and policy academics. This combination of Charter defense and broad community support led to the B.C. Court of Appeal ruling that there “is no longer any serious debate” on the need of the health care services provided by InSite.

Neither Justice Pitfield’s ruling, nor the current appeals ruling argued that addicts should be immune to the laws concerning controlled substances. Rather, they both acknowledged what ideologues and many others refuse to recognize – regardless of the state of existing drug laws and potential outcomes, addicts will continue to access controlled substances illegally; forcing them into unsanitary and dangerous situations as a result of the criminalization of medically supervised services, unduly infringes on their right to life and personal security as guaranteed in the Charter and constitutes “a law that is arbitrary, overbroad or grossly disproportionate in its effect”.

InSite opened in 2003 with exemptions from the federal government to shield staff and patients from prosecution under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA). The current B.C. Supreme Court hearings were initiated by the Portland Hotel Society (PHS) in 2008 as a result of the refusal of then Health Minister Tony Clement to extend further exemptions to InSite, despite considerable academic research supporting its stated goals of harm-reduction and widespread support from both community and provincial authorities.

Related posts:

1. Supreme Court of Canada Renders Quebec’s Bill 104 Unconstitutional On October 22 2009, the Supreme Court of Canada judged...
2. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s Economic Policy of Deficit Reduction is Not What it Seems Let’s get straight to the point. The deficit is an...
3. Exclusion of Women’s Ski Jumping from the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics is a Supreme Court of Canada Cop-Out On December 22nd, the Supreme Court of Canada refused to...
4. Stephen Harper Turns to Hypocrisy in the Face of Discord I read with some interest in the Globe and Mail...
5. Bilingualism in Canada – The Great Language Debate Bilingualism in Canada is undeniably one of the most prevalent...

Tags: canadian drug policy, InSite, supreme court of canada, vancouver

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Crime, health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.