British Columbia’s drug decriminalization pilot is set to expire in 2026, but it may end well before that depending on how the provincial general election goes this fall.
While the ruling NDP remains fairly committed to the pilot that began about a year ago, B.C. United Leader Kevin Falcon and B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad have both vowed to take strong action against the pilot if elected.
Others, however, have held fast to the province’s strong harm-reduction approach, opposing any limits on drug use and saying all stigma must be removed so that people don’t use drugs alone, which they say makes overdose more likely. B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson favoured this view in the recent injunction.
The injunction expires in March, by which time the NDP will have to either propose revised legislation or abandon the limits on public drug use all together. How Premier David Eby’s government reacts to the injunction could have big political implications, says David Leis, vice-president at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy think tank.
“It puts the current government in a difficult quandary, because they have been instrumental in pushing for the so-called ’safe drug-use' strategy,” Mr. Leis told The Epoch Times. “It will be very hard for them to back away from this policy.”
With the election slated for October, “this type of decision couldn’t have come at a worse time [for the NDP],” he said.
Shifting Political Ground
Mr. Leis noted that the NDP is increasingly torn between its “ideological warriors” and more blue-collar voters who align with the party’s worker rights policies. The “warriors” especially champion decriminalization as well as sexual orientation, gender identity, and other equity and diversity policies.“Blue-collar workers or working people are increasingly abandoning the NDP, and this is happening because they’re realizing that they don’t have much in common with the ideological parts of the party,” he said.
Stewart Prest, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia, agrees that Mr. Eby is in a tough position having to unite the two factions.
At best, he may strike a compromise to “keep those factions together and sufficiently satisfied, if not overjoyed, with the overall direction of the party and province,” Mr. Prest said.
The NDP is trying to cater to more moderates by supporting limits on decriminalization, Mr. Prest said, but “they would seem to be, in some sense, talking out of both sides of their mouth on the issue.”
Mr. Leis summarized a slew of issues related to livability in the province that the NDP will have to address if it’s to be re-elected. Rising crime as people look to feed their drug habits is one of them.
‘More Fulsome Debate’
The B.C. Conservatives and B.C. United are likely to continue and even ramp up their criticism of NDP drug policy as election time approaches, and this “could open up a more fulsome debate in society over harm reduction,” says Jason Morris, a political science professor at the University of Northern British Columbia.“I appreciate that elections are not necessarily the best place to debate policy,” Mr. Morris told The Epoch Times via email. Nonetheless, he says greater scrutiny of whether harm-reduction goals are being met is a positive outcome of the political debate.
“The issue defies any kind of easy resolution,” Mr. Prest said. “So it’s an area that certainly requires continued political attention, and hopefully it receives that beyond its role as a political football.”
