The opinion polls were proved wrong last week when the Liberal Party achieved a landslide victory in the Canadian General Election.
They won 184 seats and 54% of the vote, whilst when the final tallies were in, the outgoing Conservatives could only muster 99 MPs.
The polls had the parties neck and neck throughout the campaign, which was described by one pundit as “the most personal and vitriolic this country has ever seen.”
The Prime Minister-designate is Justin Trudeau, the son of former PM, Pierre Trudeau, who was a sort of proto-Bill Clinton and Margaret Trudeau who scandalised Canada in the ‘70s by leaving him to have an affair with Ted Kennedy – and then went on tour with the Rolling Stones.
On the night her husband was ousted from office, Margaret was to be found strutting her not inconsiderable stuff in New York’s Studio 54. These were both contributing factors to the couple divorcing in 1984, after which Pierre, who’d previously gone out with Barbra Streisand, started dating Margot Kidder who played Lois Lane in Superman.
One of their 43-year-old son’s election pledges was to legalise marijuana “right away.”
“That’s something we look forward to taking up, but from the federal side of it, moving it to a place where it is controlled and regulated is something we will start doing immediately,” said Trudeau, who’s admitted smoking cannabis “maybe five or six times.”
“The current hyper-controlled approach around medical marijuana that actually removes from individuals the capacity to grow their own is not going in the right direction, in either respect to freedom or the kind of care that people need,” he continued. “We don’t yet know exactly what rate we’re going to be taxing it, how we’re going to control it, or whether it will happen in the first months, within the first year, or whether it’s going to take a year or two to kick in. We haven’t released a time... We want to get the best ideas from various places and construct a Canadian model.”
His Conservative opponent, Stephen Harper, responded to Trudeau’s pro-legalisation stance by claiming that “marijuana is infinitely worse than tobacco and it’s something that we don’t want to encourage.”
A Conservative mailer was sent out claiming “Trudeau’s agenda would make it easier for kids to get and smoke marijuana.” That scare- mongering hasn’t stopped him and the Liberals romping home – or shares in Canada’s biggest medical marijuana company, Canopy Growth, from rising by 21%. His matinee idol good looks didn’t do Trudeau, who identifies as a feminist, any harm either, with his approval rate among female voters off the Richter scale.
His election is good news for Vancouver’s InSite supervised injecting centre, who’d feared that their funding would be harder to obtain if the Conservatives were returned to office.
The facility was set up in 2003 to tackle the city’s spiralling HIV transmission rate – and a similar spike in overdoses.
“If you look at a typical InSite client, they are long-term drug addicts, marginalised and disconnected from family, usually homeless and have associated health issues,” says Anna-Marie D’Angelo, Senior Media Relations Officer with Vancouver Coastal Health, who run the centre.
“Previously, they’d go into, say, a clinic and go, ‘I want to get off drugs, I want to detox’ and be given an appointment that invariably they’d fail to keep because their lives are so chaotic. Here, when they’re ready to go and detox, they just walk upstairs.”
Located next to a hotel on a busy downtown street, InSite is visited by an average of 600 people a day who either go to a booth and inject under the supervision of a nurse or pick up clean needles. They deal with 30-plus overdoses a month, ranging from mild allergic reaction to full-blown cardiac arrest, but have never had a client die on the premises.
“Case studies show that nothing else has worked for these people in the past,” Anna-Marie D’Angelo continues. “Slowly they gain confidence and are able to start making constructive decisions in relation to their drug use. We’ve gone from almost Third World levels of HIV transmission to having one of the lowest rates in Canada. Sometimes there’ll be a bad batch of heroin and the police will tell people, ‘Go to InSite because if you get into difficulty they’ll be able to help’.
“From a purely monetary point of view, the city is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from police, ambulance, firefighter and other first responder crews not having to attend to people who’ve overdosed down alleys. The local community benefits because they’re no longer injecting in public, and there’s a reduced strain on hospital emergency departments. Supervised injecting centres work on every front.”
Which is yet more ammunition for Minister Aodhán Ó Ríordáin as he attempts to persuade his government colleagues that supervised injecting centres are precisely what we need here.