The reason citizens feel this way is because they’ve seen the half-assed policy we have, where we don’t enforce drug laws, but don’t support addicts either, and the result is serious harm to just about any city of size in most of Canada.

The correct solution would be a) housing and comprehensive supports for addicts, so they have a roof over their head and can get clean, b) safe-supply, and c) actual enforcement of laws and bylaws so that the only place you can use your safe, free supply is the home from a) or the treatment centre in b).

All of this would cost money and political capital. The cheap solution was to just do a half-assed job enforcing laws about drug use, and a similarly half-assed approach to the crime caused by drug use, with a token few bucks thrown at safe-consumption. This looked wonderfully progressive, and it had the benefit of being cheap and keeping the riff-raff out of nice suburban spaces. Basically, we looked at Portugal’s solution, and did maybe 30-50% of it, and looked all shocked when it didn’t work.

Now we’re dealing with a situation where we didn’t address the causes of addiction, and piled on not addressing the impacts, either. And people–voters, people who live and work in downtowns scorched by addiction–are unhappy about it. And now it’s a more expensive problem then it was 10-15 years ago.

This is painfully typical of Canada: ignore a problem when it’s cheap to fix, half-ass a solution, and then cry poverty and powerlessness when the problem metastasizes into a crisis. See: healthcare, education or immigration

Maybe next time do this stuff during your mandate instead of the last eight weeks?

Exchange, formerly known as “what if we made an email server, but it’s database is Microsoft Access?”

GaetzGate

The RNC saw moderates kicked out by voters in primaries, and candidates made sure to run.

Why can’t the DNC and progressive voters do the same?

The how-to-search-for-people-to-follow thing caused me trouble with Mastodon. I could handle getting a client and an account, but actually finding people not on the same instance as me was a challenge. Discoverability was pretty broken.

Bluesky doesn’t seem to have that problem.

Lemmy I’ve stuck with because it handles that better.

The same way the Tea Party primaried out moderate Republicans.

Show up and vote.

What a coincidence, housing is also 300% more expensive relative to income!

Must be all that avocado toast…

And this attitude is precisely why people won’t support SCS.

You might think think this, and people like you might think this, but it convinces no one else, and telling them they’re selfish is a great way to get them to vote against you in even greater numbers.

Try building some bridges and explaining how SCS sites actually reduce crime, needle waste and such. Then talk about how we need housing on top of that.

Yes, people are selfish and care about their own interests. They’re people. You need to work within those constraints if you want change. If your plans for a better society involve expecting better people, you won’t get there.

I’m old. That’s what I know them for.

Ford doesn’t care.

To be honest, a lot of voters see this as a feature, not a bug. One less junkie to steal their stuff, shit in the park or cat-call them.

This is what advocates need to learn: saying “Ford has blood on his hands” does not work, because people don’t care about addicts’ lives. They’d be quite happy if more addicts die. I’ve heard more than one downtown business person say they’d rather not carry naloxone kits, and many, many downtown citizens who say things like “hopefully we lose a bunch during winter”.

I don’t think the advocacy community understands how much the empathy of the voting public is used up: voters can’t see a doctor, can’t afford rent, have trouble finding a well-paying job and now they’re being asked to be sympathetic to people who stole their tools from their car, or their kids’ Christmas presents off their porch, or who leave broken crack pipes in the only park they can use to walk their dog.

We’re going to need to explain to voters how SCS sites help them without talking about saving addicts’ lives. Because people want addicts to go away, and they’re getting to the point where they don’t care how that happens.

As someone who lives near one…

• They do cut down on paraphenalia waste, though since people can’t use inhalable drugs, crack pipes are everywhere and anything that can be set on fire is often set on fire
• Yes, they attract people, but not nearly as much as the drug dealers that pitch tents and sell out of them. Portable drug dens, not SI/SC sites, are a serious problem

As with everything related to drug policy in Canada, we did the cheap half: provide precarious funding to a handful of under-resourced services and don’t give them legislative freedom to do the job correctly.

If you wanted this to work:

• Allow inhalables
• Don’t allow consumption off site. At all. Drugs get confiscated if you try to leave with them, and they’re confiscated if you’re using in, eg, a public park.
• On that note, get police to do their fucking jobs, get out of their cruisers, and maybe enforce a law or two? Like, we have an SC site, and we have shelter space, but apparently that’s hard work and it’s easier to just let addicts deal drugs and swap stolen property all day, for months.
• Housing. Holy fucking shit, we need housing. Nothing, and I mean nothing, breeds crime like drug addicts tenting.
• While we’re on tents, I could really stop with suburban NIMBY do-gooders bringing addicts food and new tents. There’s a food bank and several shelters in the area, drop the food there. If you’re so keen to let them tent, offer them space in your backyard, not in the few green spaces that downtown residents can no longer use because addicts wreck them

(side note: I’ve seen the very same people who do the donation run protest about SCS sites and pop-up/tiny-homes outside of specific areas of downtown. They’re up for doing a Timmy’s run and getting their church to buy a tent, but no addicts in the suburbs, please & thanks)

I get why Ford has the support to do this. A lot of people, especially people who live in small Ontario towns and cities, are absolutely sick of addicts ruining things for everyone. Of course, Ford won’t do the right thing, because the right thing costs money, which is why we’re here. It won’t fix the problem, but like everything Ford does, it seems like he’s taking action if you don’t look too closely.

Plus, the operating budgets for these can be given the developers; win-win for Ford.

For now.

When the Trump administration is done gutting the NHTSA, not so much.

Please do.

Especially American liberals. Please move to, eg, Alberta and Ontario specifically and knock the UCP and OCP off their perches.

Remember they made the Democratic Party primaries less democratic after Carter was elected because he was too left wing. And they’ve only been able to nominate neoliberals since.

It’s amazing that a naval officer/peanut entrepreneur/devout Christian was “too left wing”, especially since he got beat by a Hollywood union boss from California.

Mind you, we just had an anti-elite rebellion led by a thrice-divorced billionaire failson of a New York City real estate magnate.

No less than The Economist uses the BMI (“Big Mac Index”) to compare economies.

I was going to say, this is how we get “I am Legend”.

It was. But there’s a social contract being violated, here.

Also, the guys in the photo above? their rights to own guns were tramped out by that notorious liberal pinko commie Ronald Reagan, because as it turns out, they aren’t for the freedom to bear arms, just the freedom for people they like and feel are on their side to bear arms.

If the Panthers started up again, you can bet all the second-amendment types would be begging for gun control in five minutes.

The correct response is “If I’m going to jail because abortion is murder, I may as well kill my rapist”

The people complaining about intolerance are themselves intolerant.

Umm, yes. That’s the point.