Make no mistake, the UCP’s planned ‘compassionate intervention centres’ will be jails

Make no mistake, the two “compassionate intervention centres” planned by Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government will be jails. 

At a fancy televised news conference in Calgary yesterday with a large cast of supporters, Premier Danielle Smith and Mental Health and Addiction Minister Dan Williams – both of whom are under a dark political cloud as a result of their prominent roles in the continuing dodgy contracts scandal – said the government would spend $180 million to build the two new drug jails, one in Calgary and one in Edmonton. 

Each jail will have 150 “secure” beds. Presumably there will be a steel toilet with no lid behind the locked door to each room, although we were spared that detail at the news conference and in the boastful news release that claimed without evidence the so-called “Alberta Recovery Model” makes this province “an international leader in addiction treatment and recovery.” 

The news release also stated as fact that Alberta has established a “gold standard” opioid addiction treatment apparently not discovered by all the other jurisdictions that are dealing with this deadly worldwide crisis. 

Well, one doesn’t need to be an expert in addiction treatment to know from the controversy among experts surrounding this long-telegraphed plan – which seems to have been inspired by the premier’s former chief of staff, Marshall Smith – that these are highly tendentious claims.

But while the announcement and news conference yesterday and embargoed “media briefing” this morning on the same topic are clearly an attempt to distract the public from the scandal sparked by the startling allegations in former Alberta Health Services CEO’s Athana Mentzelopoulos’s wrongful dismissal statement of claim, the government’s plan to incarcerate drug users, even if on sincerely compassionate grounds, nevertheless warrants grave concern.

In particular, we should be wary of the claim that the government’s planned “compassionate intervention legislation” – which is still being cooked up somewhere in a back room of the Legislature Building, another hint this news conference came with an unrelated agenda – “would allow family members, guardians, health care professionals, police or peace officers to request an addiction treatment order for Albertans who are a danger to themselves or others due to their addiction or substance use.”

This sounds very nice, but between the lines it smacks of police being able to toss people into jail on a whim without a hint of due process. 

Given past hints dropped by Ms. Smith that her government would use the Constitution’s Notwithstanding Clause to pass this law in the face of likely court challenges, we should not be reassured by the promise “safeguards would be built into the compassionate intervention legislation to ensure individual rights and freedoms are protected.”

Unless you’re a Postmedia political columnist, that is, in which case the opportunity to be able to say something nice about the Smith Government after weeks of troubling stories must have come as a huge relief. 

Well, perhaps some of those safeguards will be the topic of this morning’s closed-door briefing. And maybe there will be some questions when the Legislature resumes sitting this afternoon. 

Nevertheless, notwithstanding Mr. Williams’ claim during the newser that “this is a health care policy, this isn’t a justice policy,” the sensible conclusion is that the UCP intends not only to build jails in which people can be quickly incarcerated without meeting the standards of a normal judicial proceeding of the sort required to imprison someone for a Criminal Code offence, but that it is prepared to do so in defiance of constitutional norms of a free society. 

Researcher Euan Thomson, author of the Drug Data Decoded blog, compared the plan last night to expanding conversion therapy and rebuilding residential schools on a mass scale. “The UCP should be repealing the Protection of Children Abusing Drugs Act for the safety of Albertans,” he said yesterday. “Instead, they’re building the Compassionate Intervention Act for the benefit of the private treatment industry.”

The opioid crisis is a real crisis that is taking real lives. But the UCP appears willing to use the promise of a largely untested and highly controversial approach to addiction for political gain. 

Political use of therapeutic treatment with high potential for abuse should always be cause for concern. In 2025, watching the history unfolding south of the Canada-U.S. border, can we be confident that drug “treatment” will never be abused in Alberta as psychiatry was used to remove dissidents who openly contradicted official dogma from Soviet society during the years Leonid Brezhnev was leader? 

That could never happen here. Right?

Finally, given the revelations in a series of news stories in recent weeks, talk of multi-million dollar contracts to build new facilities of any kind should make any Albertans’ spidey senses tingle.

“Albertans have every reason to question this government’s ability to deliver addiction services – or, frankly, any sort of health care – in an ethical way,” said NDP Mental Health and Addiction Critic Janet Eremenko. 

“This government cannot be trusted to dole out either capital or operating contracts to private providers under the shadow of these serious corruption allegations,” she said in a statement sent to media. “The UCP’s failure to manage the surgical centre contracts at the heart of this scandal shows why Albertans should be skeptical of any potential political interference in future deals.”