Manitoba is doubling down on a failed drug policy

Manitoba is choosing to expand the same drug policy model that other provinces are abandoning

Interview requests

The New Democrat premier of British Columbia, David Eby, stood before reporters last spring and called his government’s decision to permit public drug use in certain spaces a failure.

The policy was part of the broader “harm reduction” strategy meant to address overdose deaths. Instead, it had stirred public anger, increased street disorder and had helped neither users nor the communities that host them. “We do not accept street disorder that makes communities feel unsafe,” Eby said. The province scrapped the plan.

In Alberta, the Conservative government began shutting down safer-supply prescribing due to concerns about drug diversion and misuse. The belief that more opioids can resolve the opioid crisis is losing credibility.

Ontario Progressive Conservatives are moving away from harm reduction by shutting down supervised consumption sites near schools and limiting safer-supply prescribing. Federal funding for programs is decreasing, and the province is shifting its focus to treatment models, even though not all sites are yet closed.

Yet amid these non-partisan reversals, Manitoba’s government has announced its intention to open a supervised drug-use site in Winnipeg. Premier Wab Kinew said, “We have too many Manitobans dying from overdose.” True. But it does not follow that repeating failed approaches will yield different results.

Reversing these failed policies is not a rejection of compassion. It is a recognition that good intentions do not produce good outcomes. Vancouver and Toronto have hosted supervised drug-use sites for years. The death toll keeps rising. Drug deaths in British Columbia topped 2,500 in 2023, even with the most expansive harm reduction infrastructure in the country. A peer-reviewed study published this year found that hospitalizations from opioid poisoning rose after B.C.’s safer-supply policy was implemented. Emergency department visits increased by more than three cases per 100,000 population, with no corresponding drop in fatal overdoses.

And the problem persists day to day. Paramedics in B.C. responded to nearly 4,000 overdose calls in July 2024 alone. The monthly call volume has exceeded 3,000 almost every month this year. These are signs of crisis management without a path to recovery.

There are consequences beyond public health. These policies change the character of neighbourhoods. Businesses suffer. Residents feel unsafe. And most tragically, the person using drugs is offered little more than a cot, a nurse and a quiet signal to continue. Real help, like treatment, housing and purpose, remains out of reach.

Somewhere along the way, bureaucracies stopped asking what recovery looks like. They have settled for managing human decline. They call it compassion. But it is really surrender, wrapped in medical language.

Harm reduction had its time. It made sense when it first emerged, during the AIDS crisis, when dirty needles spread HIV. Back then, the goal was to stop a deadly virus. Today, that purpose has been lost.

When policy drifts into ideology, reality becomes an afterthought. Underneath today’s approach is the belief that drug use is inevitable, that people cannot change, that liberty means letting others fade away quietly. These ideas do not reflect science. They do not reflect hope. They reflect despair. They reflect a politics that prioritizes the appearance of compassion over effectiveness.

What Manitoba needs is treatment access that meets the scale of the problem. That means detox beds, recovery homes and long-term care focused on restoring lives. These may not generate the desired headlines, but they work. They are demanding. They are slow. And they offer respect to the person behind the addiction.

There are no shortcuts. No policy will undo decades of pain overnight. But a policy that keeps people stuck using is not mercy. It is maintenance with no way out.

A government that believes in its people should not copy failure.

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).