Good morning. Wendy Cox in Vancouver this morning.

A news conference held Monday by the architects of B.C.’s strategy to combat the overdose crisis was an aggressive rebuttal of federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s attacks on the province’s attempts to reduce overdose deaths – even if the tone of the news conference was not one of heated condemnation.

No, said Chief Coroner Lisa Lapointe, data do not support the idea that more people are dying with drugs provided by the province’s safer-supply program in their systems. That’s contrary to a March 2 tweet from Mr. Poilievre that said the policy was “flooding the streets with heroin, fentanyl & crack.”

No, said Children’s Representative Jennifer Charlesworth, there is no evidence that hydromorphone, an opioid prescribed to people as a safe alternative to fentanyl, is ending up in the hands of children, as Mr. Poilievre suggested May 12.

But apart from the obvious effort to throw cold water on an overheated political debate, Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry was direct when it came to her concerns about the safer-supply program.

As Xiao Xu writes, Dr. Henry said the safer-supply program, launched in 2020, is undergoing a review that could take weeks, months or longer. What emerges from the review could put B.C. once again in the position of experimenting with drug policies not contemplated in most of the country.

Dr. Henry noted the data have shown no increases in opioid use disorder since the advent of safer supply. In fact, it has actually decreased. But she said clinicians are saying that hydromorphone is not meeting the needs of those who use drugs, and she acknowledged that there is a risk that young people are accessing that supply. “We really need to pay attention to this,” she said.

She also acknowledged that it is possible that some people are reselling hydromorphone in order to access stronger street drugs.

Safer-supply programs are very limited, she said: less than 5 per cent of people who use drugs have access to a prescribed safer supply, and that safer supply is hydromorphone. The review will examine whether the safer-supply program should be expanded to include other safer opioid alternatives, and safer alternatives to stimulants like meth. She noted there is limited information on people using powdered fentanyl or pharmaceutical-grade heroin as safer alternatives.

She said the review will also examine whether the distribution of safer-supply drugs needs to be changed because of barriers, including the reluctance of some people to go through the medical system to access the program. She suggested the province needs “a spot somewhere in the middle,” between a restricted safer-supply program and the relatively easy access people have to alcohol. She pointed to the way cannabis is distributed – it is highly regulated by government, but accessible without a prescription – as a possible solution.

“We need to look at non-medical models, but they need to have controls so that it is not something that’s flooding the streets, as the term was used earlier, and it’s not just giving out free drugs to people.”

Dr. Paxton Bach, an addiction-medicine specialist at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver and co-medical director at the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use, agreed that the province’s safer-supply program needs to be expanded.

He said prescribed safer supply has been a tool for clinicians to help support people who are at risk of dying from the toxic drug supply, but that the scale of people at risk of harm and the speed at which that supply is evolving make it impossible for a medical approach alone to address.

Dr. Bach said he agrees with Dr. Henry’s comments that multiple models for accessing a regulated and predictable drug supply are needed, and that appropriate models will vary widely depending on the population, the context and the drug itself.

For example, he said, community-led approaches, such as compassion clubs and co-ops, are a possible way forward. Dr. Bach added that any legally regulated system should balance benefits and harms to ensure that those who access it can consume drugs with relative safety while minimizing potential individual and social harms.

“Our current approach leaves the production and distribution in the hands of organized crime, and they have no such considerations,” he said.

This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.

A global trade analyst says a potential strike for more than 7,000 terminal cargo movers in ports throughout British Columbia could have dire consequences for not only the Canadian economy, but globally as well.

International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada, which represents workers who load and unload cargo at port terminals in cities such as Vancouver and Prince Rupert, said in a bulletin that its negotiating committee has authorized a strike vote.

Union president Rob Ashton said in the bulletin that the vote will take place June 9 and 10.

Neither the union nor the BC Maritime Employers Association have responded to a request for comment on the possible job action.

Alberta’s top court has cut the prison term of an Indigenous man who choked a woman nearly to death in front of two of her young children to four years from nine, ruling that even in crimes of serious violence, federal law requires judges to consider Indigenous ancestry when handing down a sentence.

While that principle is not new, the sentencing of Indigenous offenders has been inconsistent, the Alberta Court of Appeal said, with some judges minimizing the importance of Indigenous-related hardships.

The court said judges should try to walk in the shoes of Indigenous offenders before they sentence them.

“Sentencing judges must try to understand what influenced an Indigenous offender to act in the way he did,” Justice Jolaine Antonio and Justice Bernette Ho wrote. (A third judge, Justice Frederica Schutz, heard the case but did not participate in the ruling because she is on leave for health reasons unrelated to her judicial role, a court spokeswoman said.)

The Nature Conservancy of Canada has announced a plan to protect iconic Prairie grasslands, considered one of the most endangered and least protected ecosystems in the country.

The plan aims to raise $500-million by 2030 to conserve more than 5,000 square kilometres – about six times the size of Calgary – in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

“What we’re trying to do is accelerate the rate of conservation in the Prairie Provinces, specifically in the grasslands,” Jeremy Hogan, the non-profit organization’s director of prairie grassland conservation, said in an interview.

“They are Canada’s most endangered ecosystem. There’s only about 18 per cent left of the Great Plains Prairie grasslands in Canada and we continue to lose about [600 square kilometres] a year.”

Robert Gray is an AFE-certified wildland fire ecologist with over 40 years’ experience in fire science, management and operations in Canada and the United States.

Wildfires in Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan are not unusual in May. What is unusual this year is the magnitude of fires in those provinces. And as evacuations and losses become the norm, we must remember that this doesn’t have to be the case, because we can actually do something about it. But the way forward is not through the steadfast pursuit of a flawed approach to fire management.

The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) identified the major flaw in fire management in 2020: We spend an inordinate amount of money on response (firefighting) and recovery (rebuilding after a fire) and not enough on mitigation and prevention.

According to the UNISDR, “nearly 87% of disasters-related spending goes to response, reconstruction and rehabilitation, and only 13% goes towards managing the risks which are driving these disasters in the first place.” At this year’s World Economic Forum, proponents insisted that a shift from postdisaster recovery to prevention, resilience and risk reduction needs significant investment to save lives and protect against damages. It has been well established by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that every dollar spent on predisaster risk reduction results in US$6 to US$13 in savings.

For months, Mike Stolte has watched the rapid deterioration of his neighbourhood in historic downtown Nelson, B.C., a decline precipitated by activities at a nearby provincial health facility that has become a hangout for drug users.

Every day, a group of up to 20 young people gathers at the Nelson Friendship Outreach Clubhouse, where mental health and addiction programs are available. But outside, people have been selling and using drugs.

When neighbours complained to the police, officers said their hands were effectively tied because of the province’s experiment with decriminalization. As of January, people are now allowed to carry small amounts of drugs and use them publicly in B.C. But Nelson residents are now stepping around needles and stepping over those who have passed out on city sidewalks.

“I’m a pretty liberal person who has been involved in compassionate programs for hospices and other entities,” Mr. Stolte told me. “So, I feel for anyone battling addictions. I was initially a fan of decriminalization but I think the longer we continue with this experiment, the more and more downtowns are going to cease to exist. Nobody will want to go near them.”