Calgary’s police chief said the Sheldon Chumir Health Centre isn’t the ideal location for a supervised consumption site due to the concentration of clients that weren’t in the area before.

Chief Mark Neufeld talked with LWC about the public safety aspect of the supervised consumption site during a year-end interview in December. He said that the problem isn’t having a supervised consumption site, it’s the location of it, given the density of commercial and residential properties in the area.

The City of Calgary has been dealing with public frustration over the site’s existence since it opened back in 2017, with one-time Ward 8 Coun. Evan Woolley calling for changes six years ago due to increases in social disorder and public drug use in the area.  

Since 2021, an alternative solution has been sought for some of the challenges in the area, with the province saying in 2022 that it was working on plans with the Alpha House and the Calgary Drop-In Centre.

Calls for the location’s closure have ramped up in recent months, with a recent push from the province to force Calgary city council into making a decision on the site’s future. Calgary city councillors, in a split vote, first opted to amend a motion to ask for more information before deciding the supervised consumption site’s fate. After approving that amendment, city councillors proceeded to defeat a motion calling for a decision, thus bouncing it back to the province.

Chief Neufeld said that since the site opened, social disorder has very much concentrated in the area.

“I think with Chumir, I think we put it in an area that made sense from some standpoints, from the health standpoint, but what it did is it actually introduced a higher number of vulnerable clientele into an area where they maybe hadn’t been concentrated like that,” he said.

Ideal spot, says UCalgary health expert

Additional police officers have been deployed to the area, and it’s continually a crime and safety hotspot, Neufeld said.

“When you talk to businesses and people living in the neighbourhood, you can see when you go around the amount of investment that’s gone into buildings and that type of thing for trying to keep individuals off the front doorsteps, trying to prevent break-and-enters, needle debris and other types of garbage,” he said.

“There’s a lot of people that are very frustrated.”

Ward 8 Coun. Courtney Walcott, whose area covers Sheldon Chumir, provided CPS stats to his colleagues when they discussed the matter last October. He said there hasn’t been an increase in social disorder overall in the area. Walcott’s data didn’t break down how the calls themselves have been concentrated in a specific target area like the Chumir, but the Beltline social disorder numbers are generally in line with call volumes from 2018 to 2024.

Chief Neufeld said one aspect of the drop in calls is that people are frustrated and the behaviour in the area has been somewhat “normalized,” he said.

Despite some of the challenges, UCalgary’s Jennifer Jackson, who is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Nursing, said the Chumir is the right spot for several reasons: its proximity to health services, relative proximity to transit, other support services, and shelters mean that the accessibility is exceptional.

She said that harm reduction is an essential gap that’s being filled in the healthcare of vulnerable Albertans dealing with addiction. Jackson’s heard the comments about these sites being moved elsewhere, including former Premier Jason Kenney’s suggestions they could be moved into industrial sites, or out in the middle of nowhere.

“What I think underpins some of them, is we just don’t want to see this every day, and it would be better if people could be homeless and poor in a place that didn’t make us uncomfortable,” she said.

“I really reject that premise, because we should be uncomfortable with the fact that there are people who are unhoused in our city, this should make us uncomfortable. We should want to do something about it.”

More of the sites are needed: Jackson

Jackson said the Chumir site is uniquely situated in an area where homeless Calgarians will frequent, and offers an urgent care setting, an addictions clinic, and other services. She said that at least 10 per cent of the appointments at Sheldon Chumir are for people seeking social supports.

“We also don’t want to move people away from the places where they may be sleeping overnight. So, the Drop-In Center, Alpha House, other shelters downtown,” she said.

“If you start separating these services out and making them farther away from one another, it’s not going to be feasible. They’re going to make choices like, ‘Do I sleep rough, or do I consume drugs without support?’ That’s not something we want to do.”

Jackson, along with other colleagues at UCalgary, believes that having more of the centres, spread out across the city, would mean that vulnerable Calgarians using opioids wouldn’t be concentrated in one location. It would further allow site customization for different populations, Jackson said.

When asked if that could possibly spread out the public safety issues to other parts of Calgary, Dr. Jackson said the added sites would have to have a full suite of services.

“It does mean we need sufficient resources in the system so that we are creating several well-staffed places that have adequate resources, not that we’re taking resources from one site and trying to spread them thin,” she said.

She also compared the approach to that delivered during COVID-19. Comparable numbers of people died from COVID and drug poisonings in both 2020 and 2021, according to the Alberta Substance Use Surveillance System and the Alberta respiratory virus dashboard. With COVID, there were testing locations across Calgary.

“It’s just the same kind of approach here with another health care service,” Jackson said.

Balancing act, said Chief Neufeld

Chief Neufeld said that one of the unanticipated aspects of the supervised consumption site at the Sheldon Chumir that’s evolved over time is the use of methamphetamine. He said the location was designed for the consumption of opioids. The two drugs have different behavioural outcomes.

Still, he said it’s important to have a continuum of services for those dealing with addiction – both supervised consumption and recovery-oriented solutions.

“That’s really the balance, isn’t it?” Chief Neufeld said.

“It’s trying to figure out what is that delicate balance around trying to support people who are caught up in the throes of addiction, and then also trying to make sure that community isn’t so negatively impacted that everything becomes out of balance.”

Jackson said the evolution of drugs is indeed a growing problem. She said it’s no longer the days of Pablo Escobar bricks of cocaine coming up from Mexico. It’s like the difference between your grandma’s rotary phone and the latest iPhone, she said.

“When somebody is using combinations of things like fentanyl and crystal meth – these are drugs with a potency that we have never seen before,” she said.

“These are made in labs… They’re doing things to people’s brain chemistry.”

That’s when the criminal activity kicks in, she said.

“The so-called criminal activity, people are doing that not for kicks. They are doing that because they require money to buy substances without which they will die,” she said.  

“So, I don’t condone that, but I can put myself in their shoes and see that these are people that don’t have any other options. If we did create other options, that they could get these agonist treatments, they could get into safe housing, that would address a lot of these problems.”