LILLEY: Alberta drug treatment legislation based on culture of 'life-affirming health care'

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Alberta is taking another bold step in the fight against opioids and addictions, one that could save lives, but also one that will see court challenges.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Danielle Smith government introduced legislation, the Compassionate Intervention Act, to allow for mandatory drug treatment for people who “are likely to cause harm to themselves or others.”

Dan Williams, Alberta’s minister of mental health and addiction, said the goal of the legislation is to ensure families don’t have to watch loved ones slowly kill themselves.

“Well, the idea is recovery. The idea is a culture of life, of life-affirming health care that heals and doesn’t harm,” Williams said in an interview about the government’s plans.

It’s another example of Alberta taking a radically different path in terms of dealing with the opioid crisis that has harmed so many across the country. The province has rejected the idea of so-called “safe supply” and moved toward addictions treatment rather than drug consumption sites and the decriminalization of hard drugs.

That’s the path that British Columbia has been on and the path that top officials in Toronto were pushing for until Ontario Premier Doug Ford stepped in to put a pause on the slow descent into hell. No province, though, has reversed course and moved toward the addictions treatment model quite like Alberta and the results are positive.

Opioid deaths dropped by 37% between 2023 and 2024 as the province shifted focus.

“The Alberta Recovery Model is saying something categorically different,” Williams said. “We’re saying that instead of having a health-care system that facilitates and continues to harm people with addiction, let’s get people health care that heals them. Let’s get them recovery and the Compassionate Intervention Act is a small part of that continuum.”

If the new legislation passes — and there is no reason to think that it won’t — an application could be submitted by an adult family member, guardian, health-care professional, police or peace officer. That application would then be reviewed and, if approved, the person could be placed in a secure three-month treatment plan or a six-month community plan.

There is no doubt that there will be constitutional challenges to this legislation. Activists who have been driving the agenda on drug policy in Canada for decades will see this as a threat to their plans for ever-liberalized drug laws.

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Asked about a constitutional or charter challenge, Williams said he is sure the legislation complies with the charter as written, but added there is no constitutional right to keep overdosing.

“We had one individual, Brian, who overdosed 186 times last year,” he said. “This is not a lifestyle choice. And to those justices that say that this is somehow unconstitutional, I don’t know a single one of them that would say, ‘If it was my son or my daughter, there’s some constitutional fairy tale idea that you need to overdose the 187th time and die because the constitution says so.’ It doesn’t work that way.”

When Alberta said it would chart a different course on addictions treatment, it was openly mocked. The success of its new model, however, is something to be replicated and not ridiculed.

With a population closing in on five million people, Alberta is less than a third of Ontario’s population and was closing in on matching its opioid deaths in real numbers. Now that has reversed with just 1,182 opioid overdose deaths in 2024 compared to 1,873 the year before.

Time for other provincial governments to start paying attention to the Alberta model.