KENNEY GOVERNMENT WANTS THE HOMELESS TO DIE

(My comment on the much-subscribed Change Alberta Facebook site which is 
largely commentary by myself)

If there was a cancer clinic in your neighbourhood that created parking 
problems and you lobbied to close it down, you would be regarded as a 
monster. It's a health facility and the health of the vulnerable, when 
they include the middle and upper classes, is regarded as paramount by 
most citizens. And you wouldn't get away with saying, "at least keep 
away the lung cancer patients. Most of them got themselves into that 
condition by smoking."
So why is it OK for homeowners and business owners who colonize rough 
areas of cities through gentrification to oppose health services for the 
poor and often homeless folks, generally Indigenous and racialized, who 
were there before them? Addiction is a medical issue. Psychiatric 
research demonstrates an 80 percent comorbidity between addiction and 
mental health issues. In turn, mental health issues are more common 
among the oppressed sections of society for historical reasons. The 
ravages of residential schools, dispossession of their lands, and the 
larger societal effort to commit genocide against Indigenous peoples 
lives on despite words of apology from Canadian governments largely 
unmatched by actions to aid Indigenous efforts to regain their 
millennial cultures. People born with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, a 
kind of life sentence at birth, mostly end up homeless. And yet the same 
people who would pour disdain on someone who dismissed lung cancer 
patients for their smoking often think it is is just fine to ignore the 
needs of addicts while emphasizing the "community interest." Somehow, 
the homeless and the poor are removed from the gentrifiers' definition 
of community.

Jason Luan and Rod Knecht, who put the interests of exclusion-minded 
"communities" above the interests of those requiring the medical 
attention of supervised consumption sites, should be viewed as Canadian 
versions of Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte. He simply has the 
forces of law and order murder homeless addicts. Canadians are too 
polite to allow so direct a policy but the more shameless among us are 
cold-blooded enough to shut down services that would keep them alive 
when they are not willing or able to avail themselves of rehabilitation 
services that, in any case, are scarce and often ineffective.

The decision by the Alberta government to inspect only the so-called 
"social and economic" consequences of supervised consumption sites and 
ignore their role in keeping vulnerable people alive violates the 
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The federal government should 
act to shut down such an inspection or at least refer it to the courts. 
While Jason Kenney supported the let-them-die side regarding Insite when 
he was the number 2 man in the Harper government, the Supreme Court 
ruled that that side was violating Charter rights. Nothing has changed 
except that Kenney is now a provincial premier. His intentions regarding 
medically supervised consumption sites have not changed. But neither has 
the law of the land. He should be stopped in his tracks by the federal 
government.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/consumption-site-review-alberta-drugs-luan-committee-1.5252093

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